My personal Microsoft presser highlight: Dance Central 2 will feature side-by-side competitive multiplayer. No more of that one-after-the-other bollocks, which is never a good way to get people dancing in public. Time to for me to throw a DANCE PARTAAAAAAY! :)

In other news:

I am assured that the press conference opened with Modern Warfare 3 footage, which I missed due to problems with streaming. It was probably awesome. Read the Modern Warfare 3 preview we posted last week.

Crystal Dynamics came onstage to demonstrate Tomb Taider on the Xbox 360. We were treated to a segment from the beginning: Lara held captive and swinging from the ceiling in a rather spider’s-victim-like fashion. In finest Tomb Raider tradition, a bit of swinging back and forth from a rope allowed her to break free and plummet several dozen feet onto a rock surface from which her only injury appeared to be some sort of ongoing stomach cramp. The rest of the demo featured lots of stumbling through water, flames and mines collapsing as Lara made sex agonised groaning noises. The game does look amazing and I don’t recall a single QTE or giant yellow prompt button. There is hope…

Tomb Raider

The Sims Pets will feature Kinect voice control. Could be great fun if the pets are as adorable as Nintendogs.

Mass Effect 3 will also feature Kinect voice control and not in a good way. You read out the text shown in the dialogue wheel and Shepard will respond by saying something else entirely, as has always been the way with that blasted wheel. I’m not afraid to say that this was really fucking disappointing. Micrsoft have put a great full-body motion recognition system in living rooms and the best that a huge sci-fi franchise can think to put in is voice recognition? The Normandy’s galactic map would be a great way to make you really feel like a spaceship captain while showcasing gesture recognition in a core game. Nope. Let’s read the dialogue wheel out loud instead of using the joystick. Shameful.

Of course, for all I know there is no galactic map in Mass Effect 3. We’ll see.

Mass Effect 3

On the other hand, Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier had an incredible implementation of gesture control in the menus. Spread your hands to “explode” a rifle into its constuent parts, move to rotate the menu and select new parts. I liked that part a lot. Not so keen on using hand gestures to fire guns. I’ll see if we can get some hands-on footage of this in action during the expo.

Fable: The Journey had me very excited for a couple of minutes when they announced gesture-based spellcasting. Throwing fireballs was a little disappointing but there was a great thunderbolt spell charged by rubbing your hands together, then spreading them to generate the charge. Would be great fun but for the fact that it’s on rails. I don’t think you can even aim. Again, I’ll check it out on the stand and see if we can film anything.

Kinect Star Wars was another disappointment on rails. Yes, you can wave your arm around light you’re holding a lightsaber and yes, it makes the awesome whoooooom, whoooooom noises but looks to be like another Joyride-style implementation that doesn’t give you a whole of control. I don’t think the lightsaber tracks your movements very well and the game doesn’t seem to require many sword tactics. After the excellent tracking and limb targetting available in PlayStation Move’s Sports Champions, this is just poor. Kinect Star Wars also had a section where you raise both hands to lift a spaceship and shift it out of the way – could have been fantastic fun, Force Unleashed-style, but it looked very much like a pre-set sequence where you do what you’re supposed to and no more. I can’t even be arsed to look for this on the floor.

Kinect Star Wars

YouTube and Bing are coming to the Xbox with voice-controlled search for both. “Xbox Bing big bouncing beauties”

Gears of War 3 footage was shown – it still looks epic and it still has kraken. I’m impressed by the “Silverback” suits in the sequence we got to see. You can’t go wrong with big metal exoskeletons.

Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary will be released worldwide on 15th November 2011. They’ve rebuilt 7 of the best multiplayer maps in HD using the current art style and completely remastered the audio.

Halo CE Anniversary

Halo 4 was announced. We’ve no real info on that except for a link to the Halo 4 section on Xbox.com

A few more fun-looking Kinect family titles were covered. Tim Schafer’s Double Fine productions are doing Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster. There will also be Kinect: Disneyland Adventures, a fun game-filled tour of Disneyland, and Kinect Fun Labs, where you can apparently scan yourself and the Xbox will automagically recreate you as an Xbox avatar. The demo lady’s clothes even matched her avatar’s in the demo but I’m reserving judgement until I see it for myself.

Analysis

Seen in the context of this morning’s Wii U reveal from Nintendo, this Kinect line-up is nothing to get excited about. Despite attempting to draw in the core gamers with franchises like Fable, Star Wars and Mass Effect, the implementations are perfunctory and uninspired. I’m still going to check out the show floor and see how games like Hulk Hogan’s Main Event play but the future of Kinect as a core gamer’s peripheral really doesn’t look good.

Weefz reviewed Psychonauts back in 2005 when it was first released and loved it. So if you fancy playing it yourself, it’s only £5.99 on Steam. Super cheap!

Doublefine has managed to achieve a 100% being dropped by publishers, going through four of them – though, as Schafer notes, since they still exist, so maybe there’s a business plan there after all.

Rock Paper Shotgun: Develop 10: Schafer on Future & New Games

Vaizey spoke about the industry as a viable asset in Britain private sector but said that smaller measures were better suited than tax relief, despite him strongly backing relief before the election and being a strong pro-videogame voice within the Conservative party.

Nukezilla: Ed Vaizey: Industry “Hasn’t Made The Case For Game Tax Breaks”

Apparently I am the Barry Manilow of game development, and a mug to spend £75 on jeans. And the topic then came up of how indies can respond directly to gamers on stuff like messageboards. Basically I started making the point, and mark was also agreeing about how someone can email you as an indie dev, and you can reply personally back to that potential customer, and hopefully, that way you have converted that guy to buying the game.

At this point, there was this derisive snort from this guy in the front row, who said something to the effect of ‘one guy? who cares, that’s a waste of time’.

Cliffski.com: Epic Opinions (Cliffski developed life sim game Kudos 2)

Bioware talked culture. Not minister for culture, but company culture – a culture that is not a national issue; Bioware did a great talk on what culture within a developer, within a studio and even within a team was – how they got it and how they kept it.

A Great Becoming: Develop Day 2: Culture

And you have this terrible phase, which we all know, where the world looks this beautiful with this many game features, and it slowly transitions into something less beautiful with less gameplay features, because you’ve got so many bugs. And on Fable II at one point we had about 67,000 bugs. The Microsoft test team rated us ‘super black’. No-one had even been black before – they’d had red and orange and green.

Guardian Games Blog: Peter Molyneux on Fable II: “there were huge design flaws.”

The developers found that asking players to actively run around a field while also managing and tracking the movement of their teammates and opponents quickly became to unwieldy, no matter how they tweaked the controls.

Joystiq: Rare discusses new challenges of Kinect development

Were you at Develop Brighton this year? What else happened? Tell us in the comments.

Come one it has quotes like:

“I hope you learned something today”

“Yes! Shooting things is fun. And useful”

“Uuh… no.”

And

“Now why are you still talkin’ when you could be burnin’ stuff?”

• Tweet with the hashtag #brutallegend
• Follow @dinomas
• Use a hashtag aggregator to follow the rest of the #brutallegend party!

@dinomas will be asking questions. Answer them and you could win a PS3 slim, one of five Eddie Riggs statues or one of twenty-five “Fan Packs” (stickers, zipper pulls & patches).

Let us know if you win!

Edit:
#BrutalLegend has reached 4th on TwitScoop trends halfway through the party

Brutal legend is due for release on PS3 and Xbox360 on the 13th Oct 2009.

12+

What is it?

A bizarre and wacky adventure game from the creator of Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. UK release date of 03/02/2006

Is it fun?

Yes.

Is it worth the money?

(£17.99 from play.com) US$9.99 from Good Old Games

Yes, absolutely.

Why?

It has quotes like:

“I hope you learned something today”

“Yes! Shooting things is fun. And useful”

“Uuh… no.”

And

“Now why are you still talkin’ when you could be burnin’ stuff?”

Psychonauts is a chirpy light-hearted video game where you help Raz (your psychic trainee hero) learn his new skills to earn his Psychonaut merit badges while wandering through bizarre mind-worlds to sort out entanglements in his and his teachers’ brains. These worlds are brilliantly diverse and psychedelic is the only appropriate word for the level designs.

Puzzles are mostly of the shooting or jump-about-platforms variety but with enough mad locations and twisted pathways to keep them interesting. The plotline and one-liners are intriguing enough to keep you going, although if you weren’t amused by the quotes above, this game definitely isn’t for you. I particularly like the freedom you have to explore and collect items – it’s story-driven but you never feel rushed into the next section. There’s always plenty of time to wander around for the scavenger hunt, or stop and chat to your crazy fellow students.

Another very nice point is that the game’s restore points are very conveniently placed, so if you do die you don’t have to play through miles of platform that you’ve already completed just to get back to the tricky part.

Stylish design, entertaining plot and cheesy jokes. Just my thing!

Links:

Official website
Tim Schafer

Screenshots: