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Activision's press conference featured six different upcoming games, all of which are either the continuance of popular series or are licensed from some other entertainment intellectual property.
Tony Hawk's Proving Grounds was announced and some details were given, then footage of gameplay was shown. Proving Grounds concentrates more on defining you (your character) as a skater. Proving Grounds will have new features that help to push the personalization and community aspects of the experience further. After talking with one of the developers at NeverSoft for a bit, they brought out a guest: Tony Hawk, himself, to discuss the game a bit.
Activision is working on a new game for Jerry Seinfeld's upcoming Bee Movie, unsurprisingly named, Bee Movie Game. This game has been designed to be true to the movie and, on the 360, provides graphics that are very true to those found in the animated feature. Evidently, there are a lot of gamers working for Dreamworks Studios, and they made lots of suggestions as to how to make a game that is both fun to play and true to the license. Hopefully, this will result in one of those rare games that are both based on a movie license and truly fun to play. The trailers that were shown seemed to be primarily "twitch" type gameplay, where you are required to hit a certain direction button at a certain time. Hopefully, there will be more to the gameplay.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was shown next. This press conference was the first showing of the 360 version of this game, and it looked sweet, indeed. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars focuses more on teamwork and objectives, allowing players to do well even if they're not the type that likes to simply run around blasting everyone.
Spider-Man: Friend or Foe is intended to be accessible to a younger audience. Part of this is, no doubt, the more "cartoony" graphics style, making the violence more animated, as well. Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, surprisingly, takes place in a variety of locations throughout the world, such as Egypt, Tokyo and even Transylvania. One interesting feature in Spider-Man: Friend or Foe - and evidently where it gets its subtitle from - is that after you beat a villian, they become a playable character. Another neat feature is the instant multiplayer feature; a friend can press (Start) to instantly join in and then another button press to leave the game. Before they finished talking about Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, they thanked Stan Lee for creating Spider-Man in a cameo appearance that rivaled any of his movie cameos for brevity. I was hoping to get a picture, but he didn't even so much as approach the stage. He simply stood up and smiled and kind of waved, then ducked out about 20 minutes before the end of the press conference. Oh, well... at least he was there, right?
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare brings things "up to date," if you will, putting you in current-day battle with current-day weapons. This game is getting a lot of interest; it was announced yesterday at the Microsoft Press Conference and instantly the servers for signing up received triple their typical traffic, shutting them down. For this game, the guest that came out was the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's military adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Keirsey, although he didn't have much to add and, instead, quickly turned things over to a developer on the project.
Guitar Hero III was truly exciting; it is going to feature several popular artists and will even be featuring Slash as a boss character. Slash came out as a guest appearance for Guitar Hero III because not only is he in the game, but he actually plays the Guitar Hero games a lot when on tour. |
