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| | May 19, 2006
Fun and Games in Sunny California
Ahhh, the week after E3. The crowd-fueled adrenaline may be just a memory, but everyone who attended the show is still talking about it. Not familiar with E3? Technically, it’s the Electronic Entertainment Expo: a trade show for game companies and related industries, retail market buyers, and the press… but that dry little summary doesn’t do justice to the actual event. | |
| In an attempt to describe E3, Xbox engineer SciFiFoFum suggests that you should “find the biggest, flashiest, loudest pinball machine in the world, take the glass lid off, stick your head inside, and stay like that for several hours. For a more authentic experience, do this while imbibing cheap beer.” E3 is, without a doubt, the most raucous, teeming, extravagant, bewildering, and exciting videogame event in the western hemisphere, and it is the place to see what sort of games and gaming trends are on the horizon. Every major game company has a booth at E3, each of them more elaborate and captivating than the last, all competing for attention like peacocks in the mating season.
Needless to say, MSN Games was there. | |
| Wallflower in the Spotlight
For me at least, the big news from E3 this year wasn’t a specific game. This is remarkable in itself, since Halo 3 was announced, and that’s like the promise of a steak dinner at the end of a long diet. (And I’d hate to imply that I’m not squealing like a total fangirl over this announcement, because I am!) But even more intriguing was the unexpectedly large media coverage of casual games: magazines and papers everywhere aren’t just mentioning the sort of games you’ll find on MSN Games and Xbox Live Arcade, they’re featuring them!
In previous years, more traditional videogames dominated E3 to the point of exclusion. The big flashy booths with live rock music don’t generally promote “fifteen minutes of fun”-type games; if a game doesn’t take 80 hours to finish and cost millions to develop, it isn’t really important enough to be front-and-center. Simple-and-fun games are typically relegated to the darkest recesses of big corporate booths, or exiled entirely to Kentia Hall (sort of an E3 backwater where small companies without exorbitant budgets huddle together and ambush passing journalists). More recently, some of the most popular casual games have gotten better exposure in the main halls, but they’re still generally treated as afterthoughts.
So to hear that respected videogame journalists were actively seeking out easy, enjoyable games for the web, Xbox Live Arcade, and mobile phones… even if it meant entering the once-scorned Kentia Hall… well, it’s absolutely heartwarming. According to one of our booth-bound buddies, JoshuaH, journalists and players alike who were hurrying through our area on their way to higher-profile Microsoft games tended to stop short and pick up a controller as soon as they saw UNO. MSN Games’ Texas Hold’Em was also a big hit at our booth, as was Totem Ball for Xbox Live Arcade. Considering the big-name titles they had to contend with, I’m so happy they were getting the recognition they deserved!
I just have to cheer for UNO in particular. We’ve been playing a lot of this around the office, and I swear it’s what Xbox Live Arcade was made for. There’s just something about UNO that brings people together – old friends or complete strangers – as they plug in headsets, deal out the virtual deck, and proceed to laugh together and cheerfully insult each other until the game is over. When I was a kid, a friend’s grandfather introduced us to UNO… I remember playing in college; I remember playing at friendly get-togethers in my very first apartment; I remember playing with friends while standing in line for a new movie. UNO is like an old friend itself, and I have to say that playing over Xbox Live has almost exactly the same feel as playing in person. You can even set various house rules: I call my favorite setup the “maximum damage” variant, where you have to draw until you find a playable card, and you can avoid a Draw Two or Wild Draw Four card by playing another one, thus passing the pain along to the next player in line.
Now we wait until the Xbox camera is available… with the headset, I can hear my opponents curse my name and parentage when I play that Reverse just as they’re about to go out, but I’m really looking forward to also watching the change of expressions when I challenge their Wild Draw Four and succeed. Man, I love UNO.
Anyway, individual games aside, I’m thrilled to see that the casual genre as a whole is getting more attention, and I really hope that in future years, this type of game will be more prominently displayed at E3 and similar trade shows! | |
| Tech Time
So we had a little issue this last week where some of the animated images in your badge album may have been… well, less than animated… okay, invisible. Not to put too fine a point on it, but somebody here made a change to the badge album and some of the special achievement badges stopped working properly.
Now let’s introduce the hero of this story, an MSN Games player named Renee. As a serious game-player myself, I stand in awe of this lady, since she has won every single special achievement badge we’ve offered. All of them! That’s astonishing! She noticed that some of the images were missing from her badge album and dropped us a note, allowing us to get the problem fixed much more quickly than we would have on our own. So big kudos and a round of snaps to you, Renee: your dedication, gaming prowess, and keen observation helped us to quickly identify and fix a technical problem!
And now… maybe you can give me some game tips on Astropop? Because I’m having one heck of a time nabbing the Blasteroids badge…
See you all next week! | |
