This is hardly news, but boy is the DS Lite nice. Smaller, lighter, brighter indeed. Penny-arcade joked that the screen burns with the brightness of 1,000 suns, and they aren't far off. I found it slightly easier to pause (reach the start button) on the old DS, but that's all I can really come up with on the negative side.

As of a couple months ago, the DS sold 16 million hardware units worldwide. I wonder what the numbers will be like a month or two after the US release.

 --Sirlin

Unfortunately, I have to give the New Super Mario Brothers (DS) a 7.9 rating out of 10. My first impression, like pretty much everyone else, was somewhere around 9.5. The game has *great* presentation and plays as well as ever.

 Mario has a million game mechanics now. Really huge mario, really tiny mario, wall slide, wall jump, butt stomp, floating after jumping on springboards, diving from the float, ability to carry springboards, sidling on ledges, tightrope walking and jumping, one way floors, one way doors, turtle shell Mario, and so on and so on. All sounds great so far.

I have three main criticisms. First, I do not like the philosophy behind the secrets in this game. Every level has 3 large secret coins to find (sounds good), but the methods used to hide these coins are just not up to par. They are similar to the methods used in Donkey Kong Country 1, rather than the much better DKC2. NSMB has far too many cases where you really have no way of knowing if you should have done this or that thing to get to the coin, then you see you guessed wrong and now you must do the level over to get it. Even DKC2 had some of this with the forced-advancing levels, but NSMB has tons of it. I got really tired of seeing that I rode the wrong platform or whatever, and realizing I'd have to restart the level to get the secret coin I just passed. Secrets should encourage exploration, not constant restarting. DKC2 remains the best platform game at hiding secrets.

Not liking the methods used to hide secrets might not seem like a big deal, but it is in fact the central goal of the player. I take the entire goal of the game to find these secrets, so if they are about a 7.9/10 fun to find, then that's unfortunate.

Second, the emphasis on pits that kill you. Yes, the original Super Mario Brothers has lots of pits that kill you, but we're not in the 1980s anymore. Dying and doing the level over and over is a dated mechanic, and I expected NSMB above all other games to show us that. Unfortuantely it doesn't and is full of those familiar instant death pits, the concept of lives, and restarting levels. Just like God of War shows that a game is fun when dying makes you repeat as little of the level as possible, NSMB *should* have showed us that platform games are about exploring to find secrets, rather than lots of instant-death pits.

I can imagine some people disagreeing with my second point, but there is really no excuse for the third: you can't save anywhere! The only times you can save the game are when you beat a castle for the first time (end of world), beat a tower for the first time (middle of world), or pay secret coins to open a mushroom house. This is really, really bad.

For example, let's say that i just finished a level and got 1 of thd 3 secret coins because I jumped down the wrong shaft to get this coin or killed the only turtle that could be used to get the other one, or whatever. Then I play the level again and accidentally fall into a pit of instant death and die. Then I play it again and fall into some other instant death pit. Then I play it again and die again and again, because that's what happens in this game. Ok, I finally get the other two secret coins, yay! Now I repeat that entire process on the next level. Now I feel like playing some sudoku on Brain Age or my girlfriend wants to play Nintendogs. But NSMB won't let me save the game! I have to beat a tower or a caslte or spend coins on a mushroom house (which I probably wanted to save for some specific use).

One year, Shigeru Miyamoto was kind enough to appear at the Game Developers Conference and give a keynote lecture about game design. I still think about that lecture. In it, he said the #1 rule of game design is "When you press the jump button, the character should jump." He isn't kidding. In the original Tomb Raider, you don't jump when you press the jump button. Instead, you jump the next time that your running animation reaches the point in your stride where jumping would "look good." You should jump when you PRESS the jump button. He's really talking about having responsive controls in general, and doing stuff like having a basic attack come out when the button is released or something, as opposed to pressed.

Anyway, it's a great rule that reminds about responsive controls. Here's my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supercede the player's real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever. In NSMB, an example way to handle this would be to allow the player to save the game in the pause menu at any time. It wouldn't have to save your position in a level or the state of enemies in the level or anything so fancy. The only thing that really matters is if you finished the level or not, and which secret coins you found on the level.

In fact, they even have a mechanic in place already that would prevent you from getting the coins in a way the designers didn't intend. There are some coins you can get by jumping into a pit or something and getting the coin on the way down just before you die. Interesting to note that you don't actually get the coin until a couple seconds after you touch it, because it has to fall down to the coin holder on the bottom screen. So even if you got a coin, paused the game and saved right before you died in the pit, you wouldn't really have the coin. That's fine because you weren't SUPPOSED to jump into the pit to get the coin. The real puzzle was to do some certain jump or throw a turtle shell at it or whatever, and adding this save feature wouldn't diminish that.

Anyway, the game is fun and great looking and all that. Secrets should have been hidden much better, the game should have graduated from the 1980 idea of instant-death pits everywhere, and there is really no excuse at all for the save system. Believe me, I wanted to give this thing a 9.5 as much as anyone else.

--Sirlin

I said before that Nintendo's booth this year was the most popular booth ever at any E3. I don't think people realized that I meant that literally. This video should drive the point home.

Last year's E3 was probably the worst I've ever seen, so I was reduced to giving out backhanded put-down awards. This year, I only have genuine good things to say.

Best Game of the Show: Spore.
Spore is really on another level from everything else. The high concept looks like it's starting to gel into a cohesive experience. There are 6 different phases of the game, each one of increasing scale. Each phase has it's own editor. If I remember right, the 6 phases are cellular, creature, tribal, city, civilization, and space. The transitions between these modes are looking seamless and great, especially the transition of zooming out from the surface of a planet to seeing the whole planet and rotating it around, and the transition of flying around in space and landing on a planet and going to the surface view.

Spore showed off an even better looking creature editor than ever this year, and a new twist on the "sporepedia" that's basically a pokemon-style catalog of which creatures/buildings/whatever you've seen so far. You can click on any item in there (such as a creature) to see a trading card of that thing. They said you can print out the card and maybe play a trading card game based on the creatures (wow, I'd love to design that for them, hehe). Also, every item is labeled with the name of the person who made it. When you make a creature, it gets uploaded to Maxis's master database and other players can see that same creature (or building or whatever) in their world. You can also see how other creations by a creator you like, and you can see how many other players have seen or used your creations.

Spore is an amazing thing both technically and conceptually. It's a game that can only exist when the following 3 things collide: 1) the extremely unusual intelligence of a game designer who looks mostly outside the game industry for inspiration (go Will Wright!), 2) a team of great, solid people to support him and and believe in him because of past success (Sim City, The Sims), and 3) the infinite resources of EA, both in terms of money and in the power to contact any expert in any field that Will needs to talk to. A Magnum Opus game like Spore might a one-time event in our lifetimes.

Best Action Games: God of War 2 and Heavenly Sword.
Two wins for Sony, here. God of War 2 has great graphics for a PS2 game, and the same deep understanding of visceral gameplay and well-timed combat as ever. If it weren't for Spore, this might be this year's Game of the Year.

Heavenly Sword has amazing graphics. It's one of the best looking games at the show for sure. It also seems to have a handle on good combat, partly because it's a blatant copy of God of War (it should be called Goddess of War) and partly because the game's combat designer admitted that his he has a good background in playing Virtua Fighter and an even better grounding in Street Fighter. Considering God of Wars combat designers are also veterain Street Fighter players, it seems foolish for any game company to invest millions of dollars in a melee combat game without hiring expert Street Fighter players to guide it. Yes, I'm serious.

Best Peripheral Game: Eye of Judgment
Yeah Guitar Heroes 2 is nice. No one cares about PSP peripherals. But Sony did get on my radar again with this "enhanced reality" card game. Contrary to popular belief, it does NOT use the EyeToy. It will use a proprietary camera that will ship with the game, and that camera doesn't even have an actual product name yet.

In Eye of Judgment, the camera points downward at a game board with 9 squares. The squares start unowned by any player, and the first player to own 5 of the 9 squares wins the game. You place physical cards on the board (kinda like Pokemon cards). They represent monsters that will fight for you. The novelty is that when you look at the TV screen, you you can see that the cards are summoning 3D monsters that sit on top of the cards. The 3D monsters fight each other, adding a lot of flashiness to the card game genre.

The technology was a bit buggy, but that's understandable for an early prototype. Also, all those flashy monsters interactions took waaaaaay too long. The game itself looks like it's shaping up not to be fun. I would love to design a game for that system if I were in any position to do so, but I'm not. "Enhanced Reality" games like this could be a big new category someday, though.

Best Presenter: The Girl Who Gave The Spore Demo I Saw
I don't know who she was, but she was one of the best presenters of anything I've seen in a long time. She was a blonde woman with a ponytail and a chisled, pretty face. She had a thorough understanding of what she was presenting, was clear and articulate, and had to roll with the punches in a very unpredictable demo that involves interacting with AI that has emergent behavior. She was able to deliver a whole lot of information in a very short time without it seeming rushed. Whoever she is, I hope her boss sees this.

Best Proof of Concept for Why the Nintendo Wii Will Reach a New Market: Nintendo Sorts: Tennis
The tennis game used no buttons. You flick the controller up to toss the ball up so you can serve. You swing the controller to hit the ball. That's it. If you swing in a wimpy way, you'll get a very weak stroke. You have to really put some effort into it and move around. Everyone I saw play this game understood it immediately and had fun.

Interlude about the Wii
Note that I played the following Wii games: Tennis, Wario Ware, Pointing Demo: Shooting (aka Duck Hunt), Dragon Ball Z, Metroid Prime, Zelda.

Wario Ware is great (as is every version of that game) and I'd definitely buy it. The duck hunt demo illustrated using the device as a precise pointer. Pointing and shooting large baloons is easy, and aiming at tiny targets is pretty hard, for human reasons more than software reasons. Dragon Ball Z seemed overly designed with confusing controls, just like always. Metroid Prime illustrates that a solid first person shooter is possible. After having actually played it, I can say that it has a pretty good interface that could perhaps rival mouse and keyboard. I was personally clumsy at it though, and people who aren't "core gamers" are going to have just as difficult a time coordinating one thumbstick and one freehand controller as they would with a dual analog. Metroid is very good, but it's a gamers game. Moving the Zelda character through the world is just as easy as any other game that uses a fixed camera angles and a single analog stick (aka: easy). The various free-hand actions and weapons/combat were all implemented well. It will of course sell 10 zillion units.

Most Crowded Booth of Anything Ever at Any E3: Nintendo
I have never seen anything like the mob scene at Nintendo. Lines for DS games like the New Super Mario Brothers and Starfox were pretty damn long. The line to get INTO the area with the Wii was absurd, with something like a 2 hour wait. On thursday, Nintendo closed the line at about 1:30pm becaus they already reached capacity. I was there on Friday, and inside the Wii area (after the crazy line), every station had massive lines. Nearly an hour wait each for Metroid and Zelda, and at least 10 minutes for most other games, probably more. The sheer number of people in and around Nintendo's booth and in the many and various lines was just staggering. It was pretty clear who owned the show.

Also of note: the total number of PSPs I saw in use by actual real people (not paid workers) was ONE. That's right, in 3 days of being on the show floor almost all day, I saw one. One of my friends saw 3 PSPs in that time and another saw zero. Meanwhile, the number of Nintendo DS's was too large to even count, certainly in excess of 100. Every line at E3 seemed to feature multiple people with DS's. Some joined in impromptu games of Mario Kart, several were playing Brain Age, a few were playing Tetris, and some used the Picto-chat to communicate with each other on the very noisy show floor where cell phone reception is spotty at best. I guess a 100:1 ratio of DS's to PSPs is a pretty interesting indicator of the state of the industry.

Oh, that reminds me:
Award for the Games I Will Actually Spend the Most Time Playing: Brain Age 2 DS and Clubhouse Games DS.
These are two unassuming little titles. The new Brain Age is even better than the last, and I'm sure I'll mess around with it quite a bit. Clubhouse games has 38(!!) games on one cart, that I counted at least. Half are card games such as poker, hearts, and rummy. The others are various board games such as chess and backgammon, and there's also random stuff like darts and bowling on there too. I'd probably buy it for chess alone, so I consider the other 37 games to be a bonus. There's a difference between flashy games that look good at E3 and the games I'll actually spend time playing. I'm sure I'll end up pouring hours into both of these games.

MMOs: There were a lot of MMOs. They all seem to involve aiming a reticule, which means I have zero interest in them. Guild Wars builds on it's very strong base of good ideas with even more new good ideas, more classes, more pve missions and story, and more pvp game modes. It reamains in my mind a "theoretically wonderful game." It has the exact same interface problems as it had ever since the alpha test: interface. It's still too interested in making me click-to-move even when I supposedly turn that off. It's still too awkward to pivot the camera without affecting my character's movement. When you click on an NPC or PC, you still get that totally ugly rectangle with only a name in it, instead of something reasonable like a nice border and a portrait. Guild Wars **NEEDS** to drop whatever it's doing and give me UI that functions like World of Warcraft. That is it's number 1 problem, and I wish that would be solved and announced so I can get on with actually buying it and playing it.

And finally: Game that Will Make the Most Money: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
Although it has a great art style (much better art direction than Guild Wars), World of Warcraft looks technically dated compared to every other MMO at E3. The expansion will have two new races (who cares?), level cap increased from 60 - 70, flying mounts (at 70), jewelcrafting and socketed items. It also will probably have tons of new raid content and more half-hearted attempts at small group and solo content that will ultimately keep the game focused on it's current elitist group-only time-ocracy mentality. I *want* to be this game's biggest spokesperson, if it would only stop mimicing EQ, embrace the concept of inclusiveness for all (skilled players and time-sinkers alike, solo and small group players and raids alike), and stop treating the player base overly aggressive Terms of Service.

Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone that it doesn't matter that World of Warcrft is looking graphically worse than its competitors. It doesnt' matter that it can't show much of anything flashy gameplay-wise at E3. It's well crafted, it's addictive, and it's has fun locked up in it, and it will sell. The power of Warcraft will go toe-to-toe with Halo 3 and GTA. Blizzard please come back to us and stick with the original promises the game made during beta.

Final Summary:
Nintendo owned the show.
Sony had a few very strong titles, but the PSP is looking shaky. The $600 price tag is mostly irrelevant anyway because they'll only have 2 million units available (if that) by the holidays, so only that hardest hardcores will get one then, and after that the price will drop.
Microsoft didn't have much of anything inspiring to show, but Gears of Wars looks great of course. Halo 3 and GTA will make tons of money, and Xbox Live is still the best online experience in town. Also, Xbox 360 will probably reach 8 or 10 million units before PS3 even *launches* so Microsoft is doing just fine...but we didn't need to go to E3 to figure that out.

Long report, but I hope you find it useful.

--Sirlin

I just watched the Nintendo's E3 press conference. Looks like the "Wii" is not a joke. Even though I still think it's a questionable name, it doesn't really matter. Nintendo has the goods. They really do. I used to see them as "just" a company that made great games, but in the last 18 months, they have become an inspiration to the entire game industry.

I'm about to leave for LA where I hope I'll be able to play some of the 27 Wii games on display. I wonder if Sony or Microsoft will be able to show any games that are more fun than what's currently out on the Nintendo DS. Ironically, that's a tall order.

--Sirlin

Somehow, I am first on gamasutra's list of developer reactions to the name Wii. Neato.

I'm still holding out hope that this is a fake name Nintendo will replace at E3.

--Sirlin

I wonder if this is real or marketing misinformation to throw us off the trail before E3. Either way, it's weird.

I don't see why everyone hates this new Nintendo controller. It must be a similar phenomenon to people hating the automobile during the time of transportation by horse.

The second wrongest gaming quote this year was "Everyone loves Marvel Nemesis, it's getting a huge response here at E3. In fact, not one person has said anything negative about it." That was said by an EA representitive right in front of me at E3. I have actually never heard one single person say anything good about it.

But the #1 wrongest gaming quote of the year is "The Nintendo Revolution controller is too limiting." Let's think about that. A normal console controller offers you either 2 degrees of freedom (on the left analog stick) plus several buttons, or 4 degrees of freedom (both analog sticks) plus just a few buttons. Up/down is one degree of freedom and left/right is another. Both of these options are very limiting, and I have been constrained by them for years and years, and I'm tired of it.

Your hand naturally has 6 degrees of freedom: translation along the x,y,and z axes, as well as pitch, roll, and yaw. The Nintendo controller (held in one hand) has the first 3for sure, and it appears to have 2 of the last 3 also (I think you can rotate it along it's long axis as well as twist it left/rigth). So it probably has 5 degrees of freedom with just ONE hand. That's more than your grandmother's dual analog could muster in two hands. You also have access to 2 buttons during all this. Furthermore, you can use another one of these things in the other hand for a total of 10 degrees of freedom and 4 buttons. Or, you could use one controller in one hand and the analog stick in the other, for a total of 7 degrees of freedom and 4 buttons.

No matter how you slice it, this input device allows a whole universe of games that could not otherwise exist. Not only that, but many existing genres will be improved by it. Real-time strategy games on a console are damn hard to design control-wise. Pikmin is the best example. Imagine how easy it would be if you could move your one-handed controller around to select units and point them where to go. Use gestures on the other controller (and/or buttons) to build units. Or think about a squad-based fps. Tap your solder on the shoulder with a gesture, then point him where to go. Or a fishing game, or a surgery game, or musical game, etc, etc. There is so much you can do with this thing that I wouldn't even know where to start.

And the real killer is that there will also be an enclosure that's a more traditional console controller with this new controller inside it. It would be like using a PS2 contoller that also had 5 additional degrees of freedom (you can still move the controller around or rotate or twist it). It's stricly superior to the PS2 controller in that regard.

Is change that frightening to everyone that they just instantly reject this thing? Nintendo was the first console with an analog stick. It was the first with vibration. It was the first to ship a first-party wireless controller. And this is a new first.

Just one last question. Do you *really* think that in 12 years when you're playing your PS5 that the only input options it will have will be dual analog sticks and some buttons? Do you really think that's the future? Or, more likely, will your kids look at your dusty PS2 controller and wonder how their dads had any fun at all on such antiquated equipment?

--Sirlin