It looks like expanding the market is a common trend this E3. Everyone seems to be tackling the casual market with gusto, including the French publishing giant Ubisoft. We just got out of a press conference where the company revealed a number of casual gaming titles such as new additions to its "Petz" line-up (wild animals are on the way) and the "Imagine" line-up which is geared toward girls age 6-14. Ubisoft then revealed the "My Coach" line-up; these games are designed to do everything from helping to improve your vocabulary (My Word Coach) to teaching you another language (My French Coach and My Spanish Coach), and even giving you personal advice (My Life Coach).
So none of these titles are really our kind of stuff, but our attention piqued when Ubisoft brought out Jam Sessions. This DS title turns your DS or DS Lite into a virtual guitar that you strum with your stylus. The harder you strum, the louder the chord. You'll be able to write music and save it and play it back for your buddies. From what we could see it looked like you picked chords by pressing a direction on the d-pad.
Fortunately for the hardcore gamer, casual stuff wasn't all that was shown. Randy Pitchford, President of Gearbox Software, came out to give a demonstration of Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. What we saw was fantastic. Pitchford's two squads, one assault squad and one bazooka squad, engaged in multiple firefights. The usual find, fix, flank procedure of the "BIA" series is still intact, but now it's more realistic than ever. Bullets will rip apart wooden fences and bazookas will make short work of sandbagged positions. Near the end of the demo the squads came under machinegun fire from a distant bell tower. The effect of the tracers arching toward their position was amazing and when the bazooka team took out the tower the body of a German soldier came flying out of it, landing lifeless on the rooftop below.
We were especially impressed by the dynamic camera, which zooms in on dramtic moments in the action and goes into slow motion as you watch the carnage unfold. This happened once when a grenade was tossed in the midst of a German fireteam. An instant before the grenade went off the game automatically went into slow motion, the camera zooming over to the German squad just as the explosion sent them flying everywhere. This new feature definitely makes the game feel more dramatic and cinematic, we just hope it doesn't become too distracting in the final product.
Next up was a quick trailer of a Wii-exclusive title, Nitro Bikes. This off-road racer reminded us a lot of Jet Moto. You ride dirt bikes with rockets built into them and tear around off-road courses. Of course, you'll use the Wii Remote to do all the driving. The trailer was short and nothing more was revealed about the game other than that its multiplayer mode would support six players online.
The conference wrapped up with a trailer for the (temporarily) PlayStation 3-exclusive first-person shooter Haze and a live demo of Assassin's Creed. The demo went on a bit longer than the one at Microsoft's conference and a different path was taken through the same city to show how open-ended the game is. Other than that, there wasn't really anything new to be seen. BIA: Hell's Highway was definitely the best-looking game in the line-up, in our opinion. We're definitely surprised at how hard publishers are pushing for the casual market, but as long as the hardcore gamer isn't forgotten, we're all for broadening the market.
