Micah:

Recently, fellow GameXplain editor Andre Segers and I went to X10 to check out the games that Microsoft and third parties have in the pipeline on the 360 in coming months, so we thought that we might have ourselves a little roundtable to discuss the event as a whole and some of the games that we played briefly. Seeing as there are only two of us, the "roundtable" nomenclature seems a bit off the mark. For now, let's call this piece 'My Dinner With Andre'.

X10 had few highlights for me personally. The event sort of appeared out of nowhere as the first official GameXplain outing into the big, bad world of games journalism. I can't really say that I found myself too excited to see the games on display, but I knew that Perfect Dark XBLA was going to be there, which was enough to keep me interested. As soon as we walked in the door, we ran into a mutual friend. We casually asked him which games at the event were good, and received the disheartening reply: "Everything here is great!" But how could this be? Surely everything on display at this event couldn't be as good as he said? There were 8 or so playable games at the event, and there was no way that all of them could be of that quality. Surely something had to be amiss. I decided to investigate further and actually play some of the games.
 

Andre:

So the games I personally went hands-on with include Splinter Cell Conviction, Perfect Dark, and Scrap Metal, and I caught glimpses of many more. Of course, Splinter Cell Conviction is undeniably the biggest game of the lot, provided it's gotten a complete makeover since it was first unveiled, and it's also the one I spent the most time with, having played through most of the two levels on display. Unfortunately, I'm not sure X10 was the best environment in which to showcase a stealth game, as the loud setting completely mitigated the game's sound forcing me to rely on sight alone. Even though I couldn't really hear what my mission objectives were, I could see what they were because of the game's innovative environmental HUD. "What the hell's an environmental HUD?" I can hear you asking. Glad you asked! Instead of flashing your mission objectives on-screen, they're instead projected onto walls within the environment itself, as if a magical projector were following you around. It's a neat idea in concept, but I ultimately found it to be jarring, and surprisingly non-intuitive when I found myself desperately searching through the environment to find my projected objective. Thankfully, I soon learned the mission objective is also present on the pause screen, a seeming conceit of its ineffectiveness. 

Micah:

It was pretty interesting for me to watch you play through the Splinter Cell Conviction demo purely for the strange coincidence regarding my past experience with that game. I had actually played Splinter Cell Conviction 3 years ago at an Ubisoft event held in the exact same building as X10. That alone was pretty weird, but actually seeing the game in action was even stranger. It seems like Ubisoft pretty much scrapped everything that they had developed for this game from the last time I got to see it. Gone was the Assassin's Creed-style crowd-based hiding and hooded outfit. In place instead were the aforementioned environmental HUD and a nifty slide move. The most striking thing for me personally was the exclusion of a feature that almost no players would notice, but that the developers were pretty proud of 3 years ago. In that old build of the game, you were able to pick up any object in the environment, a feature that apparently drove the programmers crazy trying to implement. The Ubisoft rep demoing the game showed me this feature in action by having me pick up a chair and then toss it across the room. As he pointed out, when I went to go pick up the chair again, Sam Fisher would be able to grab it from any point on the object and carry it around. The Ubisoft rep seemed pretty proud of this feature, despite it being seemingly unimportant to the game as a whole.

Naturally, as soon as I noticed you playing the game, I had to see if this feature made it through the development process intact. You were running around the environment sliding into everything and everyone. When you first approached a chair, I could feel my anticipation building. Much to my dismay, you were unable to interact with the chair at all, much less pick it up any way you wanted. For shame, Ubisoft! Think of all those wasted hours programming that! At least give me my chair-carrying simulator that I have been waiting for all these long years.

Andre:

Moving on, I must admit to being distracted by the mere knowledge of Perfect Dark's presence at the show. I was a huge fan of the original and was stoked to see how it fares 10 years later (damn, I feel old). Luckily, it wasn't long before we found time to snag some two-on-one time (hot!) with both Ken Lobb and the game itself. And I'm happy to say the game seems to hold up surprisingly well. The graphics have been given a nice--if still dated--upgrade while everything else, including the core gameplay, has remained perfectly intact. Of course, while it has long been known that the game would feature online support (now confirmed to be 8-Players simultaneously), I was most concerned that Co-Op and the understated Counter-Op wouldn’t make the leap. They did. We actually gave Counter-Op a test-drive (albeit, split-screen) in

Carrington Villa, a level that, as Perfect Dark fans will recall, barely ran on the then-aging hardware. I was ecstatic to discover that it--get this--ran...with a frame rate! After I pieced together my asploded head, I promptly set out on a mission to gun down Micah as often as possible.

Mission accomplished.

Micah:

First, I think you've played way more single-player Perfect Dark than I have. Second, I totally almost killed you that one time. Third, I love this game. For me, Perfect Dark is still unsurpassed among console FPSs in its feature set, weapon selection, number of modes, and customization. For a ten year old game, that's either very impressive or simply egregious depending on how you look at it. It was great fun to be able to enjoy Counter-Op mode at a full 60 frames per second. There were still a few bugs when you moved through clipping planes, but Mr. Klobb assured us that those were not in the final version. It was a little difficult to get used to moving the reticule around with the second analog stick, as the c-buttons always worked perfectly for me on the N64 controller. The reticule felt a little laggy, like you were dragging it around the screen, and the auto-aim was a little much. Still, I can't wait for this game to hit. The inclusion of "classic" modes and weapon sets straight from GoldenEye is a nice touch, and is really just icing on the cake. This is going to be the definitive console FPS experience for most of us here at GameXplain. Of that you can be sure.

Andre:

I definitely agree the controls didn't feel quite like how I remembered, though I wonder how much of that is due to the 360 controller itself. It certainly did take me some getting used to using a control-stick to move/aim instead of the 64's C-buttons. And I also immediately noticed that the 'strafe while running' glitch to move faster was no longer present, lending the game a more sluggish feel--however, this will reportedly be rectified in the final version. Either way, I'm totally stoked to play this game (albeit, again), and at a mere $10, this is a serious bargain.

Micah:

Yeah, I can't wait for this one to hit, although I'm a little scared to face Schuyler, as he seems to just have every inch of the entire game memorized already. Nevertheless, I'm sure we'll be blasting each other's brains out for weeks to come once this sucker hits on the 17th. Unfortunately, I wasn't nearly as stoked on any of the other games on display at the event as I was about Perfect Dark (and not just because we got to hang out with Ken Lobb). Dead Rising 2 was on display, but none of the actual game was shown off. Instead, the demo just contained a room filled with the undead and several different implements with which you could take them out. I'm not exactly what you'd call a fan of the previous title. I enjoyed it for the most part, but it was also the first game I ever did a guide for, and it really sucked to play through in that capacity. The save system, terrible NPC AI, somewhat clunky controls, and totally unforgiving mission structure made for a game that was a lot less fun to actually play than it should have been.

Unfortunately, it was utterly impossible to discern from the X10 demo whether Dead Rising 2 would be plagued by the same fate. Sure, the graphics were nicer, and you could strap some chainsaws to your motorcycle, but it was definitely hard to tell whether this would ultimately be a better game than the first. The multiplayer arena modes weren't on display at the event, so I didn't even get a chance to scope those out. In talking to the fairly useless PR reps on hand, it seemed like the main character wouldn't have the wide selection of moves that Frank West did. Instead, the devs focused on item combination as the primary unlockables (such as the aforementioned chainsaw-cycle). I couldn't get a straight answer out of them as to whether or not the books from the first title are in this new installment, so I have to figure that they aren't. That's too bad, as one of my favorite parts of Dead Rising was running around with the Entertainment, Engineering, and Criminal Geography books equipped, while slicing through enemies with my (essentially limitless) mini-chainsaws. Not having these books around to modify your stats and help you hold items for longer might end up being a huge drawback for the game, as they placed more emphasis on actually scouring the mall to scavenge for much needed items.

Andre

I only watched you play Dead Rising for a few minutes, but it didn't prevent me from summarizing that yup, it's definitely Dead Rising. But that may not be a bad thing, assuming they ditch some of the annoying aspects of the original (Otis, I'm looking at you!). The only other game I was able to play at the event was the XBLA title, Scrap Metal. I only had the chance to try one of the modes, a Demolition Derby-type, but it was actually pretty fun! The controls felt tight and the game had an old-school feel that offered a very visceral response to the reign of destruction I was bringing upon my competitors. With that said, I didn't play it nearly long enough to determine whether the game will offer much re-playability, but, at the least, it's certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Micah

Yeah, that 3D looked pretty stupid. After Avatar, I've been pretty down on 3D in general; and Scrap Metal most definitely didn't impress me with its anaglyph red/blue 3D glasses that I had even see what to strap on to was going on in the game. Other than that, I didn't really check out the other things on display. I know there were videos for Halo Reach and Crackdown, but I wasn't too interested in just looking at some promotional videos. I was ultimately a little underwhelmed by the event in general, but that's partially because there wasn't all that much that felt really new there. Left 4 Dead 2 was just DLC (Downloadable Content), Lost Planet didn't seem like anything too different from the demo I've played some twenty times on my 360 already, and Dead Rising was too little to really see how different it'd ultimately be from its predecessor. Only Perfect Dark and Alan Wake felt like anything special to me, and even Alan Wake seemed somewhat derivative of Resident Evil 4. Still, I left the event pretty stoked. I mean, we're about to get a totally refined version of one of my favorite games ever!

We'll have more on the games featured at X10 in the coming weeks!