After 3 days of this I was actually happy to see it come to an end. Sure the wall to wall gaming for stuff that most people don’t get to touch sounds like a blast, but really when you’re doing it there’s a lot of stuff that wears on you and becomes quite tiring. Not that I’m complaining, I loved getting to go, talk with all the people, and see all the games, the last two years it has been an opportunity that I’ve been thankful for, but it is like going out there to work all the same.
Today was pretty much all about the next generation stuff, well since I didn’t get to see the PS3 video, today was pretty much all about the stuff coming to Xbox 360. First I played about an hour of Madden to get ready to ask them some questions about this years game for Xbox, most of which they didn’t have the answers too, and said they’d try to find them. So still don’t know about Custom Rosters online, being able to turn field vision off online, accelerated clock online, and most of the other stuff I could think of to ask. However they did assure me that things like Rich Gannon still being at the coin toss for the Raider games, and the Raiders still having a 3-4 as their main set will be fixed and are things they just hadn’t gotten to yet.
My basic impressions for Madden 2006 for Xbox left me thinking, why the heck do they put this out on the floor if they’re only gonna have it play on Rookie or Pro, which ever it is (when I asked what level it was on, no one seemed to know). Really since they show it at such a low level you can’t tell how any of the “improvements” really affect the game. They sound good I guess, but you can’t really see them work, because it really only changes the game on the higher difficulty levels. I did notice small changes in my 5 minutes they gave me on All-Madden, but really how much can I tell about a game from 5 minutes with it. But just like the first thoughts on day one, it seems to be pretty much like 2005, but with a couple more bells and whistles.
It pretty much seems like Xbox is dead for sports games, and pretty much dies after July 12th. NCAA was the only game that I got to play at the show that seemed greatly improved from what I’d played the previous year. It was pretty obvious that the developers had spent this year shifting focus to the 360 and spent most of their time and effort their and would be happy for the most part to just hash out the old titles with a little improvement here and there for those of us that want an Xbox version. NCAA seemed like it was very much improved over last year, but coincidently won’t be coming out for Xbox 360 this year, so I assume they just let the same team continue working on it and they’ll get to focus on the 360 version this year.
Now 2k sports and EA seemed to have dramatically different ideas on how to bring their current titles into the homes of gamers for the new consoles. I got the impression that EA wanted to design beautiful games, and impress everyone with the graphics and then once they got the way it should look right they’d add the gameplay and really wanted to add a new feel to each game from what it had been in the past, i.e. they weren’t gonna just bring the old gameplay style up to the new consoles. This left me wondering how these games will actually play on the 360 since they at this point were only willing to show a couple players on the field at one time for Madden cause they’re still getting everything worked out with the full squads on the field at the same time. Also the EA games on 360 will be taking leaps forward graphically, but in many areas they’ll be taking steps backwards, as it didn’t sound like Madden for the 360 will have as many game modes as the one for Xbox, and Tiger for the 360 will have all of 6 courses and 9 golfers shipped, with no plans at this time for downloadable courses. So all and all, we may get the dramatic gameplay changes we’ve been wanting from EA for so long, but they give them to us all at once and could possibly end up just continuing to tweak what they give us now until they decide they want to start all over again for the next generation. I guess I may just be skeptical or I may have the wrong idea completely, but I think that the way they seem to be wanting to kinda start from scratch on the new consoles and then we’re left with something that might not be quite right and they’ll improve year after year until they’re forced to completely change their games again.
Tiger looked nice on the 360, the player model for Tiger didn’t look as nice as Shaun Alexander in Madden, but the water rippled when you hit the ball into it and it was a very pretty game. They’ve also redone the swing trying to make the game harder, making you put spin on the ball with the right thumb stick while you do the regular swing part with the left thumbstick. So they did sound like they wanted to at least make the game a little more sim. It was also cool that you can now see the individual blades of grass on courses, but because of all the detail they’ve put into the courses in this years title you’ll only get a total of 6 courses to play on.
NBA Live looked pretty nice. They had the 3D crowds and the crowd movement seemed pretty random, not just the same 6 people doing the same thing at the same time over and over like we’ve kinda gotten use to seeing. They have a new free throw system where it’s almost like a golf swing from Tiger, you pull back on the thumbstick then you push forward, do it too fast and it might go long, don’t pull the stick back far enough and you’ll be short. Kinda cool idea, we’ll see how it ends up. The player models are also very nice. Huge improvement over any of the stuff we’d seen on Xbox or PS2.
Now Madden 360, that made my jaw drop a bit when I first saw it and figured out that what they were showing us wasn’t a video of them motion capturing Shaun Alexander, it was in fact what they had created out of motion capturing him. You could see the scar on his chin, the bit of stubble on his face, and nearly perfect design of his body as a player model. The stadiums were exact, or so I have been told, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. From what they explained they got the exact placement of every single seat in the stadium correct, so if you’re a season ticket holder you can find your seat and find out what you look like in the game I guess, or at least check out the fan that they put in your spot. All the fans will be 3D, and they looked quite nice the brief moment I saw a somewhat close view of them. Also they didn’t just add a picture of the backdrop in the background of the stadium. Instead they built a city. They actually could take the camera in the game through the streets of the city that they built which as far as I know was an exact replica of Seattle. So now they can have fly overs across the city in the introduction on the way into the stadium. All and all the game looked absolutely gorgeous but there was no way to tell how it played since you got a video of Shaun Alexander breaking some tackles, and then when they showed us the player models it was just him standing alone on the field. Hopefully it plays as nice as it looks, if so then it will be quite hard to fight off temptation for my broke *** to buy an Xbox 360.
Now I was quite happy to end the show with my trip to 2k sports, in fact there is no other way I would have rather ended it. Because pretty much, if I had seen this stuff at the beginning of the show, every other game I saw would have looked pretty poor in comparison. First there is a bit of bad news, really it didn’t look like any of their sports games were really that different from their versions last year, at least not in an improved way. They did assure me that what they have out there isn’t even close to complete and they didn’t want to tip their hand too early and let everyone see what they were doing blah blah blah, yada yada yada. So to me it just seems, like I said before, that Xbox and PS2, they’re pretty much finished, developers know that, and don’t really want to waste much time there since Xbox 360 and PS3 will be the future and where they expect to start making most of their money.
With the bad news out of the way, I’ll talk about what 2k sports seems to have done creating their games for Xbox 360. To me it looked like they took the approach that, the gameplay in their last set of games was pretty good, so there isn’t need to go just completely rip everything apart and start from scratch, what they had seemed like it played reasonably close to what they had last year, I’m sure the gameplay is very improved and all that, so it won’t be the same game as last year with just better graphics. But that kinda thing has never been the problem with the 2k sports line up, they always seem to do major fixes every year and continue to try to dramatically improve their games. The nice part about them doing things this way is we actually got to see what 10 guys on the court playing NBA 2k6 for Xbox 360 looked like, and it’s pretty damn nice. Then they likely don’t have to spend quite as much time on the gameplay and can spend more time working on the player models, and improving the graphics. I don’t know if that’s quite how it works but it seemed like they were able to mold the new games out of the old ones and just dramatically improve them with the new found power of better consoles. The video they had of what they plan to have the game look like is just absolutely mind blowing. I figured maybe they were saying they hope to make 2k7 or 2k8 look like the video they were showing, but apparently they think that’s what 2k6 will look like finished and that 2k7 will be far better looking than the video they showed us. So my immediate fear right now is that somehow EA is going to buy out the NBA to get rid of the competition from Take 2, because really what they had or what they envisioned for NBA 2k6 looked far and away better than anything I thought I’d see on Xbox 360 or PS3 until 3 or 4 years into them making games for the console. Fist off they built naked bodies, and then layered the clothing on top of that. That probably doesn’t sound cool, but when you look at it, it’s spectacular, the jersey’s and shorts actually move on their own, they’re no longer just pasted to a player and move slightly on their own. It actually looks as if the player is wearing clothes and the clothes move as you’d expect a players uniform to when they are playing. You pair that with the new player models and you have something that is just damn amazing. After seeing the stuff that 2k sports did with NBA 2k6 it really put EA’s work with Madden to shame. Again I have no idea how the finished products are going to turn out, but NBA 2k6 looks like it is truly going to be a beast and likely the best looking sports game, possibly game in general on the Xbox 360.
Amped 3 graphically didn’t look mind blowing, but it did look improved. The gameplay looked very solid, and like it pretty much delivers what it had before, the best gameplay of any thing in that genre. They did try to add elements to make the game more fun and appeal to a wider audience such as plans for different menu screens so that the game can fit your personality, as well as plans for a much more interesting career mode.
NHL 2k6 (which is at this point possibly the only hockey game suppose to be on the 360) looked very nice. I’ll let Shawn talk more about that since he plays and watches way more hockey than I do.
I was under whelmed with Top Spin 2, it looks like if you liked the last TopSpin you’ll probably love this one, but the graphics at this point didn’t seem anywhere close to as impressive as the other games. Not to say this won’t change since they have plenty of time, but it was their 360 title that had me pretty much thinking ho hum…
2k sports plans on having all of their titles ready for 360 launch although don’t know yet if they will be selected by Microsoft to be launch titles. EA on the other hand already have confirmed that Tiger, Madden, and Live will be Launch titles for the 360. So hopefully MS shows 2k sports some love too.
We were not allowed to ask questions about football games, for whatever reason that would be… also there is no comment on what they’re going to do with Links, but all I have to say about that is PLEASE oh PLEASE bring us a new Links game.
Towards the end I probably started rambling and stopped going into as much detail probably, but I’m pretty warn out, and wanted to get this posted before I had to get to other things. So hopefully I’ll go back and answer questions people might have next week, but I doubt I’ll be around much for the rest of the weekend to do much question answering.
Today was pretty much all about the next generation stuff, well since I didn’t get to see the PS3 video, today was pretty much all about the stuff coming to Xbox 360. First I played about an hour of Madden to get ready to ask them some questions about this years game for Xbox, most of which they didn’t have the answers too, and said they’d try to find them. So still don’t know about Custom Rosters online, being able to turn field vision off online, accelerated clock online, and most of the other stuff I could think of to ask. However they did assure me that things like Rich Gannon still being at the coin toss for the Raider games, and the Raiders still having a 3-4 as their main set will be fixed and are things they just hadn’t gotten to yet.
My basic impressions for Madden 2006 for Xbox left me thinking, why the heck do they put this out on the floor if they’re only gonna have it play on Rookie or Pro, which ever it is (when I asked what level it was on, no one seemed to know). Really since they show it at such a low level you can’t tell how any of the “improvements” really affect the game. They sound good I guess, but you can’t really see them work, because it really only changes the game on the higher difficulty levels. I did notice small changes in my 5 minutes they gave me on All-Madden, but really how much can I tell about a game from 5 minutes with it. But just like the first thoughts on day one, it seems to be pretty much like 2005, but with a couple more bells and whistles.
It pretty much seems like Xbox is dead for sports games, and pretty much dies after July 12th. NCAA was the only game that I got to play at the show that seemed greatly improved from what I’d played the previous year. It was pretty obvious that the developers had spent this year shifting focus to the 360 and spent most of their time and effort their and would be happy for the most part to just hash out the old titles with a little improvement here and there for those of us that want an Xbox version. NCAA seemed like it was very much improved over last year, but coincidently won’t be coming out for Xbox 360 this year, so I assume they just let the same team continue working on it and they’ll get to focus on the 360 version this year.
Now 2k sports and EA seemed to have dramatically different ideas on how to bring their current titles into the homes of gamers for the new consoles. I got the impression that EA wanted to design beautiful games, and impress everyone with the graphics and then once they got the way it should look right they’d add the gameplay and really wanted to add a new feel to each game from what it had been in the past, i.e. they weren’t gonna just bring the old gameplay style up to the new consoles. This left me wondering how these games will actually play on the 360 since they at this point were only willing to show a couple players on the field at one time for Madden cause they’re still getting everything worked out with the full squads on the field at the same time. Also the EA games on 360 will be taking leaps forward graphically, but in many areas they’ll be taking steps backwards, as it didn’t sound like Madden for the 360 will have as many game modes as the one for Xbox, and Tiger for the 360 will have all of 6 courses and 9 golfers shipped, with no plans at this time for downloadable courses. So all and all, we may get the dramatic gameplay changes we’ve been wanting from EA for so long, but they give them to us all at once and could possibly end up just continuing to tweak what they give us now until they decide they want to start all over again for the next generation. I guess I may just be skeptical or I may have the wrong idea completely, but I think that the way they seem to be wanting to kinda start from scratch on the new consoles and then we’re left with something that might not be quite right and they’ll improve year after year until they’re forced to completely change their games again.
Tiger looked nice on the 360, the player model for Tiger didn’t look as nice as Shaun Alexander in Madden, but the water rippled when you hit the ball into it and it was a very pretty game. They’ve also redone the swing trying to make the game harder, making you put spin on the ball with the right thumb stick while you do the regular swing part with the left thumbstick. So they did sound like they wanted to at least make the game a little more sim. It was also cool that you can now see the individual blades of grass on courses, but because of all the detail they’ve put into the courses in this years title you’ll only get a total of 6 courses to play on.
NBA Live looked pretty nice. They had the 3D crowds and the crowd movement seemed pretty random, not just the same 6 people doing the same thing at the same time over and over like we’ve kinda gotten use to seeing. They have a new free throw system where it’s almost like a golf swing from Tiger, you pull back on the thumbstick then you push forward, do it too fast and it might go long, don’t pull the stick back far enough and you’ll be short. Kinda cool idea, we’ll see how it ends up. The player models are also very nice. Huge improvement over any of the stuff we’d seen on Xbox or PS2.
Now Madden 360, that made my jaw drop a bit when I first saw it and figured out that what they were showing us wasn’t a video of them motion capturing Shaun Alexander, it was in fact what they had created out of motion capturing him. You could see the scar on his chin, the bit of stubble on his face, and nearly perfect design of his body as a player model. The stadiums were exact, or so I have been told, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. From what they explained they got the exact placement of every single seat in the stadium correct, so if you’re a season ticket holder you can find your seat and find out what you look like in the game I guess, or at least check out the fan that they put in your spot. All the fans will be 3D, and they looked quite nice the brief moment I saw a somewhat close view of them. Also they didn’t just add a picture of the backdrop in the background of the stadium. Instead they built a city. They actually could take the camera in the game through the streets of the city that they built which as far as I know was an exact replica of Seattle. So now they can have fly overs across the city in the introduction on the way into the stadium. All and all the game looked absolutely gorgeous but there was no way to tell how it played since you got a video of Shaun Alexander breaking some tackles, and then when they showed us the player models it was just him standing alone on the field. Hopefully it plays as nice as it looks, if so then it will be quite hard to fight off temptation for my broke *** to buy an Xbox 360.
Now I was quite happy to end the show with my trip to 2k sports, in fact there is no other way I would have rather ended it. Because pretty much, if I had seen this stuff at the beginning of the show, every other game I saw would have looked pretty poor in comparison. First there is a bit of bad news, really it didn’t look like any of their sports games were really that different from their versions last year, at least not in an improved way. They did assure me that what they have out there isn’t even close to complete and they didn’t want to tip their hand too early and let everyone see what they were doing blah blah blah, yada yada yada. So to me it just seems, like I said before, that Xbox and PS2, they’re pretty much finished, developers know that, and don’t really want to waste much time there since Xbox 360 and PS3 will be the future and where they expect to start making most of their money.
With the bad news out of the way, I’ll talk about what 2k sports seems to have done creating their games for Xbox 360. To me it looked like they took the approach that, the gameplay in their last set of games was pretty good, so there isn’t need to go just completely rip everything apart and start from scratch, what they had seemed like it played reasonably close to what they had last year, I’m sure the gameplay is very improved and all that, so it won’t be the same game as last year with just better graphics. But that kinda thing has never been the problem with the 2k sports line up, they always seem to do major fixes every year and continue to try to dramatically improve their games. The nice part about them doing things this way is we actually got to see what 10 guys on the court playing NBA 2k6 for Xbox 360 looked like, and it’s pretty damn nice. Then they likely don’t have to spend quite as much time on the gameplay and can spend more time working on the player models, and improving the graphics. I don’t know if that’s quite how it works but it seemed like they were able to mold the new games out of the old ones and just dramatically improve them with the new found power of better consoles. The video they had of what they plan to have the game look like is just absolutely mind blowing. I figured maybe they were saying they hope to make 2k7 or 2k8 look like the video they were showing, but apparently they think that’s what 2k6 will look like finished and that 2k7 will be far better looking than the video they showed us. So my immediate fear right now is that somehow EA is going to buy out the NBA to get rid of the competition from Take 2, because really what they had or what they envisioned for NBA 2k6 looked far and away better than anything I thought I’d see on Xbox 360 or PS3 until 3 or 4 years into them making games for the console. Fist off they built naked bodies, and then layered the clothing on top of that. That probably doesn’t sound cool, but when you look at it, it’s spectacular, the jersey’s and shorts actually move on their own, they’re no longer just pasted to a player and move slightly on their own. It actually looks as if the player is wearing clothes and the clothes move as you’d expect a players uniform to when they are playing. You pair that with the new player models and you have something that is just damn amazing. After seeing the stuff that 2k sports did with NBA 2k6 it really put EA’s work with Madden to shame. Again I have no idea how the finished products are going to turn out, but NBA 2k6 looks like it is truly going to be a beast and likely the best looking sports game, possibly game in general on the Xbox 360.
Amped 3 graphically didn’t look mind blowing, but it did look improved. The gameplay looked very solid, and like it pretty much delivers what it had before, the best gameplay of any thing in that genre. They did try to add elements to make the game more fun and appeal to a wider audience such as plans for different menu screens so that the game can fit your personality, as well as plans for a much more interesting career mode.
NHL 2k6 (which is at this point possibly the only hockey game suppose to be on the 360) looked very nice. I’ll let Shawn talk more about that since he plays and watches way more hockey than I do.
I was under whelmed with Top Spin 2, it looks like if you liked the last TopSpin you’ll probably love this one, but the graphics at this point didn’t seem anywhere close to as impressive as the other games. Not to say this won’t change since they have plenty of time, but it was their 360 title that had me pretty much thinking ho hum…
2k sports plans on having all of their titles ready for 360 launch although don’t know yet if they will be selected by Microsoft to be launch titles. EA on the other hand already have confirmed that Tiger, Madden, and Live will be Launch titles for the 360. So hopefully MS shows 2k sports some love too.
We were not allowed to ask questions about football games, for whatever reason that would be… also there is no comment on what they’re going to do with Links, but all I have to say about that is PLEASE oh PLEASE bring us a new Links game.
Towards the end I probably started rambling and stopped going into as much detail probably, but I’m pretty warn out, and wanted to get this posted before I had to get to other things. So hopefully I’ll go back and answer questions people might have next week, but I doubt I’ll be around much for the rest of the weekend to do much question answering.
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