Gamehelper E3 2006 Blog

Yeah, so we can be a little slow at times, but like a fine wine we age well - time will tell if the games we saw at this year’s Electronic Entertaniment Expo should be so lucky. After over 72 hours of sleep depravation, convention food prices and sensory overload, reacclimation to society can be a complicated process - let alone needing to definitively select the best of the best from, well….the rest at the show.

After two weeks of heated debate and intense deliberation the jury is out and the verdict rests at our feet - or rather - below this intro that you’ve probably already skipped. If you’ve read this far, we salute you! We’ll be saluting these games over the next few months as we dig deeper into the production process to take you behind the scenes with dev diary updates, new screens and trailers, interviews, podcasts, video clips and more as we trace these top titles from show floor to your front door. There’s oh so much to come - but for now - without further adieu - let me introduce to you (heh, that rhymed) the:

GAMEHELPER Best of E306 Awards

THQ is releasing a game that closely follows the upcoming movie Monster House, where a house “eats” a couple of kids, and they have to find their way out.

The game takes an interesting approach. Players work through the story as all three characters from the movie, but play through different parts of the house at different times. This adds for little details such as varying puzzles the second time through an area, or familiar locations that could essentially help you figure out where you’re going.

Monster House is rather cute, showing your character wielding a squirt gun that can take out crawling chair-spiders (pumping water into the reservoir is your reload). The game easily felt like a family version of Resident Evil.

I really wish I can tell you more about this game, but the guys at the THQ booth were horribly prepared. Everything I told you hear is whatever the dude I was talking to could get from his notes and what I could get from playing the demo.

With console prices rising to insane proportions, many of us have decided to hold off on purchasing a next-gen system until a game releases that is deemed worthy of the price. After getting behind the scenes at 2K, I was surprised at what I what I saw. Take-Two Interactive is currently working on their upcoming title Bioshock, the sequel to System Shock 2.

Even though we weren’t actually allowed to touch the game, the developers showed off the amazing gameplay. I’m not a huge fan of FPS titles, but adding in a puzzle aspect of having to figure out a way to kill your enemy without ammo is quite stunning. During the demo, the developers very rarely shot the character’s gun, which was a very unique approach to FPS gameplay. It was fun to see all the different ways traps or alarms could be triggered in ways that would help you defeat an enemy.

The most amazing thing to see with Bioshock is the graphics. The game is at the pre-alpha stage and the water effects are by far the best I have ever seen. Take-Two took a huge stand making Bioshock take place completely underwater, but it’s already obvious in its early stage that they can pull it off visually.

The game looks amazing, looks like it plays amazing, and has an interesting concept. I will absolutely buy an Xbox360 for this title, even if it’s the only one I will ever play.

Relic, for those of you who don’t know, is quite possibly one of the best RTS developers around. Between Homeworld 2, Impossible Creatures, and the Dawn of War titles for the PC, it seems safe to say that their games have helped revolutionize the modern strategy genre of games. Well, guess what? It looks like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade is going to once again shake things up and leave us wanting a whole lot more.

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For those of you who don’t like most animation, go out and watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. The first couple of discs are available now, and the rest of the show is being aired on Nickelodeon; it’s amazing. And funny. And heart-wrenching. And brilliant. Too bad the game doesn’t look like it’s going to have those qualities.

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Krypto is back, baby! And this time he’s meaner than ever! This time around, Destroy All Humans 2 is returning Our Favorite Martian (sorry, extraterrestrial) to America in the 60s. That’s right: Krypto 137 is going up against the populace of San Francisco when peace, love, and understanding were what all the cool kids were doing… and he couldn’t be more pissed about the entire situation.

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If there is one franchise which has saved Midway from the poorhouse, it is definitely the gold mine that is Mortal Kombat. Seriously, those fighting games are cash cows (no, we’re not counting the Mortal Kombat Mythology titles that came out a couple of years ago), and they have the habit of being completely over-the-top gorey fun. The most recent 3D fighting games of Deadly Alliance and Annihilation have been master strokes of Midway’s… if for no other reason than the inclusion of some really creative weapon styles. Well, guess what? It seems like Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, due out in October, is going to be even cooler than its predecessors.

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Why exactly does Hollywood feel the need to put out crappy games as lame tie-ins for their summer movies? Especially kids movies. I mean, they can’t really sell all that well… can they? Oh good God, what a frightening thought: Psychonauts being outsold by The Polar Express.

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To call John Woo Presents Stranglehold, the video game sequel to his monumental film Hard-Boiled, a game with an over-the-top sense of action would be one of the biggest understatements of the year. Midway is striving to achieve a true sense of Hong Kong action cinema in a video game, and it definitely seems like they could pull it off with this next-gen title.

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Atari really seems to be one of those companies whose games are a truly mixed bag: on one hand they have some respectible, if not really all that amazing, franchises like Alone in the Dark, The Matrix, and… um… Driver. On the other hand, they also have franchises like that of Dragon Ball Z which, to say the least, have much more of a niche fan-base. As we covered the floor of their display room, I got to take a look at both their newest DBZ title and Earthworm Jim (which was surprisingly sequestered off in the corner on a lonely-looking machine).

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