so daily impression thing since there's no actual thread for it.
got in early and in line for cafe right at the start of the day. still calling it cafe since the line was for 'new console.'
at 12:15, some guy came by and told us they had reached capacity for the day. people in line would not get to see the controller/system. fuck.
so i go over to skyward sword to see the changes made. game looks great, and the animation is fantastic. didn't play a lot of it- some assholes cut in the line and by the time it got to me i didn't care that i only played half a demo. people interested in this game probably should like motion controls since they're used for everything.
i checked out some 3ds stuff. super mario 3d was okay, but it controls exactly like super mario 64 ds does on the 3ds. even if you use the slide pad, it's digital. you have to hold down a button in order to run. bullshit. wasn't too crazy about the level design either.
played star fox 64 and ocarina of time. both were nice. strangely enough they had the best use of the 3d for me. it didn't feel so forced.
before i left the nintendo booth, i checked out kirby wii. it was okay. in multiplayer, the game only recognizes kirby as the character to go through doors and the like (also, if kirby dies, it appears the other characters die too).
on my way out, i noticed a wii u being passed around, so i got my hands on one. the thing is fucking huge, but comfortable
only because it's not heavy. the biggest problem i have with it, and it's a big, big issue, is that the controller has two slide pads. it feels wrong. when i asked one of the guys at the booth, he basically said that's just the direction they're going now. so that's bullshit too, and a serious amount of bullshit. i'm expecting many a modded wii u in the future.
anyway, i left the west hall after playing the ratchet & clank game. again, it was okay. one problem i had was an apparent lack of drop in/drop out. the other was that it felt more tools of destruction than a crack in time.
so the day kinda sucked eggs for the first two and a half hours. once i entered the south hall, the day improved greatly. first, i played sonic generations 3ds and hd. the 3ds version had unfortunately long load times for some reason. looking forward to the hd version though.
then i went over to the ubisoft booth and HOLY SHIT MICHEL ANCEL WAS THERE AND I SHOOK HIS HAND AND STUFF!
then i went to play rayman origins and had a smile on my face the whole time. it's extremely charming and the right amount of difficulty (with less 'i want to kill you' than found in nsmbw). easily the best game of the day.
kinda wandered around a bit until i saw a trailer for el shaddai on a tv and for some reason thought it would be at the capcom booth. so i went back to the west hall. yeah, it wasn't there, so i went to the sony booth. there were lines for everything there and the day was winding down so i wouldn't get to see anything. so i ran out the clock in the 3ds area again.
it was really weird. while i was waiting for kid icarus, i see this weird guy take a picture with some poor soul (because the weird guy looked like he had just come back from some satisfying serial killin'), and the guy he was taking a picture with was yuji naka! naka starts playing the game and bill trinen comes up to talk to one of the guys at the booth. then he turns around to walk away and runs right into kobun heat. all this happened in about the span of a minute.
anyway, kid icarus was surprisingly better than i expected. the gameplay looks slow in the trailers, but works pretty well in practice. however, i can totally see that it was originally a wii game, and i think it would have been far, far better as one. i was also a bit surprised that the voice acting was actually not terrible either.
played mario kart. yep, it's mario kart. with coins for some reason (never seemed to matter in the demo but whatever). played resident evil revelations. got attacked by thirty regenerator things with leech-mouths. then i left.
