{"id":310,"date":"2009-06-19T11:45:05","date_gmt":"2009-06-19T18:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/?p=310"},"modified":"2009-06-19T11:47:04","modified_gmt":"2009-06-19T18:47:04","slug":"e3-09-postmortem-awards-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"E3 ’09 Postmortem: Awards Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the past two weeks since E3, I’ve had a lot of people ask me what I thought of the show. I’ve generally told everyone the same story, but one I think is much more succinctly illustrated by the E3 Game Critics Awards nominees<\/a>, announced this week.<\/p>\n

Just look at “Best of Show:” — four sequels (Modern Warfare, Splinter Cell, Uncharted, Mass Effect<\/em>) and one new franchise that doesn’t seem overly impressive (Brutal Legend<\/em>). That pretty sums up what this E3 was about: it may have been at least a partial return to the Big Show feel of previous E3s, but in terms of the actual games, it was more about big publishers milking existing franchises like Halo<\/em> or God of War<\/em> or Rock Band<\/em> rather than anything really new to get hot and bothered over.<\/p>\n

Of course, not everything at E3 was a sequel or spin-off, but even many of the E3 panel’s “original” games, like Alan Wake <\/em>and Heavy Rain, <\/em>were titles we’ve seen many times before. \u00c2\u00a0Raven’s Singularity<\/em> looks cool, but the show demo was a bit underwhelming. Splash Damage’s Brink<\/em> was locked away upstairs at the Bethesda booth, and I doubt many people even knew it was there. Activision made a lot of noise with DJ Hero<\/em>, but it was hard to tell exactly how the game worked unless you had a back-room demo. It’s almost like publishers have gotten so comfy with the routine of marketing existing franchises that they’re not sure what to do with anything really new.<\/p>\n

And so that’s what E3 2009 was about: a lot of stuff you’ve seen before. Which isn’t a bad thing, as the games I most want to play are titles like Modern Warfare 2<\/em> or The Beatles: Rock Band<\/em>. But if you’re wondering what was new and cool this year, the easiest answer is: “the same stuff that was cool last year.”<\/p>\n

(P.S. No, I have no idea why this text is showing up so small. Time for some WordPress investigation this weekend. )<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the past two weeks since E3, I’ve had a lot of people ask me what I thought of the show. I’ve generally told everyone the same story, but one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e3-2009"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bytica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}