XL_MPFW

MPFW is over the hill with the 40th edition of MPFW. This time I got a bunch of notes from E3 with a review of Terminator Salvation afterwards. Let's get right to the fun stuff.

Mike's E3 2009 notes

I was off from work these past few days so I was able to watch the coverage of E3 2009 on G4. If you've been following my Twitter, I've been tweeting (though I like to say "twittering" for some reason) my thoughts of the show. Here's my extended thoughts since 140 characters at a time usually can't do much justice.

Microsoft opened their press conference with our first look of The Beatles: Rock Band. I'm not a huge fan of The Beatles, but I really would like to get this on release day. There will be downloadable songs for this game, but unfortunately the songs will not work with the main Rock Band games. It looks like the Rock Band we know and love with the addition of all of the psychedelic Beatles art. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr appeared to give the game their blessing while pretending to know about video games.

I've never played a Call of Duty game, but Modern Warfare 2 will most likely be the first one of them that I'll play. The game looks great and I look forward to get the chance to play this online with friends. Another game I'm looking forward to is Final Fantasy XIII. The gameplay footage looked good and we'll only have to wait until Spring 2010 to play it.

The most exciting announcement for me was the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2. I think it's rather soon for a sequel to this game, but if it's same game with new features, I'm sure it'll be amazing. I could care less about Forza Motorsport 3 and Halo: ODST, next please. Alan Wake looks to be very interesting and might be worth a purchase for me.

Now for the series of Microsoft's big announcements. Some new, useless features to Xbox Live like SkyTV and integration with Facebook and Twitter. Just what I always wanted to do, update my statuses over Xbox Live. The Metal Gear Solid franchise is coming to Xbox 360. Wait, not Metal Gear Solid 4, but a new game featuring Raiden called Metal Gear Solid: Rising. I guess this is good news for the fans of the series.

Finally for Microsoft, they reveal "Project Natal", a motion-sensing, voice recognizing add-on device for your 360. When the video started, I thought this was a joke, but it's very real. There is no way this is going to work as good as the tech demos. The undisputed king of broken promises, Peter Molyneux, is even part of this. I'm not planning on purchasing this. It's going to cost at least $100 and only work on a few games. Although, I'd love to try out that painting game they demonstrated.

I watched a little bit of the EA press conference. Mass Effect 2 looks like the same game as the original with the same combat system and the same overratedness. I'll wait for it to drop to $20 to play it. Brütal Legend looks very fun and I'd like to play that. I won't be playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, but the trailer shown for this game was phenomenal. I also got to see a demo of DJ Hero. This is a game I'd play if somebody bought it for me.

Now for the Nintendo portion of the press conferences. They open up announcing a new Mario game called New Super Mario Bros. Wii. This looks like the same game from the DS, but for 4 players. I'm not getting this game. Next up is Wii Fit Plus, where they're just going to milk the Wii Fit cash cow. Next they're once again announcing Wii Motion Plus, in case we forgot what it was from last year. Speaking of Wii add-ons, did they abandon Wii Speak? I don't own a DS, so I didn't pay much attention to their DS announcements.

Nintendo sorta recovers from this so far lousy press conference. The announcement of Super Mario Galaxy 2 got me excited. I'm a Yoshi mark, so I'm excited for this game. Nintendo is teaming up with the folks who made Ninja Gaiden, bringing us Metroid: Other M. This game looks very promising and I hope it turns out to be great.

I only caught the tail end of the Sony conference showing off the demo for God of War III. I'm sad that I won't get to be able to play this since I don't have a PlayStation 3. With that, nothing really fantastic coming out of these press conferences besides the announcements of Left 4 Dead 2 and Super Mario Galaxy 2. I think people are getting too excited for Project Natal.

In a related E3 note, Steve Wiebe attempted to break the Donkey Kong world record live at E3. He came up short, but I got to witness the infamous kill screen live on their web stream. Great effort, Steve. You're still The King of Kong to me!

Terminator Salvation review

You probably all know that I'm a big fan of the entire Terminator series. Going into this, I was fearing it would be pretty bad, but to my surprise, I thought it was pretty entertaining. This film is unlike the others since is all set in the future from the Terminator universe, and it's the first of the films that isn't centered around Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800.

As I said, I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I would've liked this movie more if the third film wasn't so horrible. The story was pretty good as it gives us more about the history of Skynet and their experiments on creating a better cyborg. I think they could've gotten someone else besides Christian Bale to play the role of John Connor. He comes across more as Batman during some of his speeches. This movie has some flaws, but I still enjoyed it and I recommend it. By the way, Moon Bloodgood is hot.

On a related note, the TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been cancelled. I'm not too surprised since it was getting low ratings. The second season started out iffy, but got great at the end. I'm bummed that we won't get to see them in the future, and the story arc of the T-1000's apparently helping The Resistance hasn't been resolved. This was one of the two TV shows that I followed along with Dollhouse, which is luckily up for another season.

That was fun. Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is coming out soon, so I'll be reviewing that next. Wizard World Philly 2009 is also coming up soon, so I'll be posting about that as well. See you at 41.