Random E3 Leftovers: Final Tournament Edition XXI

This is the last of my E3 stuff. Yeah, it’s all not-Nintendo, but we rushed to post that right away! It gets more and more inane as you get closer to the end. *Games featured: Dark Void, Forza 3, soil-based driving game part two, PSP crap*

Dark Void (360, PS3)

Dark Void is a third person jetpack-y game from Capcom and a bunch of dudes who used to work for FASA on the Crimson Skies games. The influence shows – in the first scene, your dude is wearing a 30s-ish leather jacket and working on a biplane. He gets pissed and tosses his wrench and it hits a jetpack that I guess he didn’t know it was there. He puts it on and then goes outside to fight some modern-looking aliens, so needless to say this game is going to be AWESOME.

Stupid plots aside, it plays pretty well. Flying around is a lot of fun, and your jetpack has guns on it. You can switch from hover mode to zooming-around-fast mode pretty easily, and the jetpack has guns on it, which is really a huge advance in jetpack technology. The aerial combat sections of the demo I played were against these spaceships that were basically the saucer things from “The Incredibles.” I hijacked one and it controlled exactly like the jetpack, which was nice. My only real complaint is that flying super fast in the jetpack while on open terrain doesn’t feel as super fast as I’d like it to, but it was still a lot of fun.

The rest of the combat is based around a Gears of War-style cover system, which works pretty well but isn’t anything special. The “neat thing” they allow you do to vertical cover using your jetpack. So you’re hanging off the bottom of a platform peeking around and shooting at dudes, or vice versa. It doesn’t substantially change the core shooting gameplay, but it could lead to some very interesting level design.

Overall Dark Void was pretty neat. The demo’s environment design and objectives were pretty pedestrian, but I was playing a tutorial level. I look forward to checking the full game out later this year.

Forza 3 (360)

I really only played Forza 3 because they had these giant kickass racing cockpit setups, and how often do you get to try one of those out? To me, a guy largely uninterested in sim racing, it is largely Forza again, except for one feature: The rewind button. You get unlimited use of basically the Sands of Time. Rewind however many times you want and try that corner over and over and over until you figure out how to drive it well. It really makes the idea of learning how to play a super-complicated sim like Forza far less daunting.

PSP Go (uh… PSP)

Kevin, Travis and I all ducked into the PSP Go area on the third day, when it was line-less and relatively empty. It seems like a pretty well-designed device, and the games they showed were neat, but $250.

SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 (PSP)

This was a PSP game about shooting dudes. It had a “lock on to bad guy” button, and then you pressed shoot. I thought it was supposed to be realistic, but then I got shot a bunch and didn’t die. I stopped playing when I found out there was a grenade button, and exploded myself.

Some PSP Game That Looks Like Echochrome And Was Basically The Shadow Puzzles From Braid, But Bad (PSP)

This was a PSP game that looked like Echochrome. It was basically the shadow puzzles from Braid, but not fun. I don’t remember the name, and I also don’t care enough about the game to look it up. It was probably called like Echoshadow or something stupid like that. Whatever, game.

DIRT 2 (Wii, 360, PS3, PC)

This was a racing game with a bunch of dirt all over the place, and I sucked at it. The producer promised a competent Wii version, though. Whatever, I say.