John Zeitler

Some days, folks, it feels really good to just not accomplish much of anything productive. I spent most of the day giving the OSX version of Team Fortress 2 a run for its money (the verdict: Valve still half-assed the port but at least it runs without crashing), did some model construction for my Imperial Guard army, and got to thinking about E3 a bit more in-depth. In years past, I’d made up a list of the companies I followed and what I wanted to see out of them. This year, of course, is no different.

Microsoft: Obviously Project Natal’s full reveal is the big push from MS this year, but at the same time I’m pretty sure they’re not the kind of company to ignore the non-Natal aspects of the Xbox 360. More to the point, though, Xbox Live has been set up for some sweeping changes in the past few months, now that Xbox 1 support was killed off. I’d anticipate hearing about a “Late Summer Update” that will offer a huge amount of advanced functionality such as clans/guilds, tighter integration with online utilities like Youtube and Hulu, and the reveal of the first fully-integrated 360/Games for Windows/Windows Mobile title. In terms of games, MS hasn’t been too shy about its reveals, so there’s not much to guess about besides Halo Wars 2, timed exclusivity for Rock Band 3, and two or three new Xbox Live Primetime games to debut this fall alongside Season 2 of 1 vs 100. If I had to ask for one out-of-the-blue thing, though, I’d love to see some of the niche bullet-hell shooters come to North America via Games On Demand, but the odds of that happening are so low as to not be worth mentioning.

Nintendo: Hoo boy, this one’s tricky. Of late Nintendo has kept absolute silence about their upcoming releases until they’re all but ready to be put on sale, so literally there’s no spoiled surprises or leaks. The premature revelation of the 3DS was, though, a leak, and I’m still unclear as to why and how that happened. Even then, the device is still a nearly opaque mystery, and as a result it’s hard to gauge what’s going to be done with it on the show floor. We’ll probably hear a NA release date of early 2011, if not (the fantastically unlikely) holiday 2010. The Big N always has a good showing for its games, and we’re likely to see final trailers for Metroid Other M and… uh… I did say this was going to be tricky. Golden Sun 3 is probably going to be playable; I’d be surprised if a classic IP didn’t make a debut this year being handled by a North American studio (the perennial favorite has always been Kid Icarus, but my money’s on Battleclash or Startropics); and a gleaming Master Ball says there’s going to be an English-language release date for Pokemon Black and White as well as at least two other spinoff games to get us by in the meantime (three, technically, since one of those “games” is going to be a new Mystery Dungeon matched pair). I continue to hold out hope that there’s going to have been some breakthrough to let Mother 3 come out, but to no avail; instead I’m going to root for a new (as in, not-a-remake) Fire Emblem game.

Sony: This also is tricky, but not because of obscurity– quite the contrary, Sony has blasted out everything they can as soon as they can, so there’s nothing left really to reveal. I have to admit to a bit more interest in them lately after how much I genuinely did like LittleBigPlanet, and how many of the classic, hard-to-find RPGs have made it onto the PSN service of late. Then again, the shenanigans they’ve pulled with the PSP Go, the removal of features from the PS3, and their stubborn refusal to let the PS2 finally die still remind me that this is the ever pragmatic-to-the-point-of-shortsightedness Sony we’re dealing with. Playstation Move is their big push to counter MS’s Project Natal and the Wii’s… well, the Wii; to be unusually witty, it doesn’t move me in the slightest. The PSN is likely to go into a tiered paid-or-non-paid setup similar to Xbox Live, but multiplayer play will be free on most games– that is, ones that are older than six months; players without the paid option will instead get a fixed number of online hours a month in those games. There’ll be a timed exclusivity on the next Guitar Hero game(s); the video store will offer movie downloads from Sony Pictures day-and-date with the DVD/Blu-Ray release; and the first hintings of the next Playstation console will be grumbled late in the show (but quietly so as to not look like giant flaming hypocrites in the face of their “ten-year” claim for the PS3). As for games, your guess is as good as mine; the only one I really care about right now is LittleBigPlanet 2, and that’s a confirmed go. If we could get more than one PS1 Classic every couple weeks, though, that’d be nice. I might even keep the machine in its standby mode then instead of all but unplugged.

Valve: I’m putting Valve here because, like it or not, they’re to the PC gaming world what MS or Nintendo are to their respective consoles. Despite my initial and ongoing misgivings, Steam’s transition to the Mac has been the checkmate move over MS’s Games for Windows Live initiative for control of the major PC market. Now, they need to go the extra mile. I expect we’ll see the Engineer Update for TF2 come in, preview movies of Portal 2 and Half-Life Episode 3, and a couple new campaigns for Left 4 Dead 2 (okay, that last one is probably going to just become Left 4 Dead 3, prompting bitching all over again). But the big news will be that Valve has struck a deal with Cydia or some other port house to greatly accelerate the parity of the Windows and Mac libraries, and will (again, counter to my expectations) maintain the “buy once, play anywhere” policy for games ported in this manner. It’s worked out well enough for them so far, judging by how many earbuds I’ve seen on characters in TF2 today. What will never ever happen, though, is that Valve, MS, and Apple struck a deal to get a version of the GFW Live client running native on OS X; I guess that means I’ll be dual-booting to get my Dawn of War II fix.

I’ll go over third-party developers tomorrow.