E3 Day 2: Meetings, Meetings, Meetings...and a Batmobile?

16 Jun 2014
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The thing about Day 2 at E3 is that its just like Day 1 in every way – except that its 4 hours longer, with 4 times as many meetings, and 4 times as many people. Despite that, we were able to fight our way to the front of lines and get a taste of the many more events and goodies offered at this year at E3. Let’s take a look!

Games

For games, we took a look at quite a few titles. Nintendo has made a not-so-modest showing with playable versions of the newest Super Smash Bros on Wii U (along with the Gamecube adapter for the Wii U), Theatrythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, Hyrule Warriors, Bayonetta 2, Yoshi’s Wooly World, and Splatoon. Super Smash Bros was available on the showfloor in both forms: for the Nintendo DS and the WiiU, which me and FusionX had a chance to play.

Also at Nintendo, we got a sneak preview at the new Amiibo figurines, although from where we were standing there isn’t much to say about its usefulness or market value. We’ll see if this NFC trend takes off in the future; for now, its available for Nintendo developers to take advantage of in upcoming games.

We also revisited the Square Enix booth next door to take another shot at the Leviathan battle. The SE team took some steps to make the battle more…doable. Upgrading each character to High Allagan gear, we learned that the mode we were asked to challenge was in between Hard and Extreme Modes, which when you are playing with people who may not have played the game before – could be a bit difficult. Luckily, the upgraded gear helped, and the added instruction from the SE team certainly didn’t hurt when there was a mechanic to explain to the new players. You can see them in action below.

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Perhaps the most interesting thing to see was the scale replica of the Batmobile for Batman: Arkham Knight that I somehow missed yesterday. It was quite something to see and prompted me to see what else Warner Bros had to offer. We got to check out Lego Batman in both single player and co-op mode, Dying Light, as well as the newest Gauntlet in its full 4 player glory. While not as impressive as some of the other booths on the showfloor, it certainly wasn’t something to sneeze at, although I would have preferred more playable demos rather than the trailers.

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We also checked out the offerings from the Indie community. Browsing the booth of Indiecade – touted as the “the video game industry’s Sundance” – where there were a ton of games to try out. There were two major showings of indie games from Indiecade’s sponsors, Xbox and Ouya, but there were also a ton of PC originals, cell phone games, and even physical board games.  We were able to play games such as Hotline Miami, Hack n Slash, Everending Nightmares – heck, there was even a game with significant input from the Dutch National Ballet called Bounden. There were too many games to count and we had a chance to try them all so stay tuned for a piece on the whimsical world of indie. For now, you’ll have to settle for a taste with a few nice screenshots.

As you can all imagine that took up most of the day but we got to play a LOT of games in very little time. With one more day on the clock of E3 there is still much more to check out. We’ll share our findings about E3 Day 3 soon enough…but until then – stay tuned!