Thoughts on the 2013 E3 press conferences

With Nintendo's "Nintendo Direct" finishing up this morning, all five of the major E3 press conferences have concluded for this year. So what were my big takeaways?

Everyone's talking about how Sony trumped Microsoft this year. PlayStation 4 will be $400, a hundred dollars cheaper than the Xbox One, and without any of the always-online or anti-used games shenanigans Xbox is pulling.

But I don't care about that. I won't be able to afford either console at launch, so launch prices don't matter to me. In the last console generation, PlayStation 3 released with a staggering $600 price tag which doomed it for years... until Sony got its act together and PS3 became the console of choice for arty games everywhere. They also introduced PlayStation Plus, essentially letting players subscribe to get free games every month and putting Xbox Live to shame. We don't know where PS4 or Xbone will be a few years down the road. And since it takes a while for new consoles to foster substantial game libraries anyway, I'll wait and see. The only thing that really matters about a game console is its games. So I'm undecided on this console war.

Xbox One does have one advantage, though. A new game from Swery 65, creator of Deadly Premonition! It's called D4:

Deadly Premonition is one of my all-time favorite games, and this one looks to be just as strange. It's being developed by Swery's studio Access Games and published by Microsoft. This will be a day-one purchase for me whenever it comes out, so I hope the Xbox One gets a bit cheaper between now and then...

The other trailer that blew me away was a game I've been waiting for for years. EA had a very successful conference in 2013, and they hit it out of the park when they closed with a trailer for a sequel to one of my other favorite games of all time, Mirror's Edge:

Of course, this was one of only two games at the entire show revealed so far this year with a non-male or non-white protagonist (the other being Bayonetta 2). I love the closing line "Coming... when it's ready." This will be on both PS4 and Xbone so it won't affect my console purchasing decision. But gosh darn, it looks beautiful. EA finally gave its Swedish studio DICE a chance to leave Battlefield for a moment and return to what truly makes it a great developer.

Nintendo holds a special place in my heart, so I'm disappointed their press conference was short and predictable. New Mario, new Mario Kart, new Super Smash Bros, rinse, repeat. Of course a new Zelda game is always nice (and an HD release of my favorite Zelda game, The Wind Waker!), and everyone's been waiting for Pikmin 3 forever. These games all look great, but there were no surprises.

I wish they would've announced some snazzy new series, or at least sequels to series that haven't gotten much love as of late... particularly my most beloved series, Retro Studios' Metroid. Retro is working on a new Donkey Kong title, so it'll be a while before they get back to Samus. But think about it: they could've announced a new F-Zero or the console-based Pokémon MMO fans want. Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. look fun... but I was hoping for more.

Sony can win the next console war for me with one thing: international awareness

This doesn't address my concerns. At all.

Like anyone, I was interested to see what Sony had in store with the PlayStation 4 when they announced it last week. For me, though, there were two glaring omissions that were even more important than the whole will-it-or-won’t-it-play-used-games thing (which doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, honestly; I’m not an impulsive game shopper: I wait for sales): the console itself, which I not only hope looks cool, but won’t take up an immense amount of my precious floor space, and will-it-or-won’t-it be region free.

For example, before it came out only about a month ago in the US, I played about 15 hours of the Japanese version of Ni No Kuni (fantastic game, btw). I am good enough at Japanese that I can read the two basic alphabets at lightning speed, but my understanding of Japanese vocabulary and grammar is more than a little suspect. As is my general familiarity with the casual spoken language. The character Drippy, named Shizuku in Japan, is nearly indecipherable in the English version of the game with his wacky Cockney-like tongue and ridiculous speed of speech, but it’s a perfect adaptation of the Japanese Shizuku, who uses un-dictionary-able slang and a speaking voice that makes you wish you had digital hands that could wring his neck through the screen. It was a very slow and difficult 15 hours and it turns out, as I discovered only a few days after receiving my American Ni No Kuni, only about five hours of actual gameplay. I’d spent around ten hours just listening to the cutscenes and reading the subtitles on pause, looking up what I could in the dictionary, and, in many cases, giving it up for slang or idiom I simply had no knowledge of and moving on. Needless to say, that was not an especially fun way to spend my time.

This whole scene was a particularly frustrating hour of attempted translation.

This is by far my most pressing concern. As some of you may recall, I live and work near Nagoya, Japan, but I am not fluent in Japanese, speaking, reading, or writing. This is an issue when it comes to games that require any amount of effort outside of platforming, sports, or music games. Role-playing games are a favorite genre of mine, but playing them with a dictionary in front of me is so ridiculously slow that it kills the game experience.

Thoughts on the PlayStation 4 reveal

After years of speculation, Sony finally announced the PlayStation 4 yesterday. It was inevitable, but considering I finally got a PlayStation 3 this past December, I was nevertheless a little bummed out.

PlayStation 4 won't be a day-one buy for me regardless of my PS3, because with the glaring exception of the Nintendo GameCube, new consoles tend to have sparse libraries for their first year of existence (yes, earlier Nintendo consoles had Mario at launch, but they didn't have anything else for a long time). No matter what the hardware is like, it means nothing without great software. What were my takeaways from Sony's big reveal last night?