LOS ANGELES – The E3 press conferences rage on, fast and furious. Next up: Ubisoft shows off its Kinect game Your Shape in more detail.
The historic Los Angeles Theater on Broadway provides an opulent setting for the Parisian publisher's announcements at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Sitting at dead center stage is a Kinect, Microsoft's motion controller for Xbox 360. Ubisoft has been a big part of Microsoft's presentations thus far. Its Kinect launch game, Your Shape, was featured at the Cirque du Soleil show on Sunday night and at Microsoft's press briefing earlier Monday morning.
Will the company unveil any new secrets about the controller? Does it have any more games in store? And most importantly, what does it have to offer core gamers who don't really want to get in shape with their Xbox? And where the hell is Beyond Good & Evil 2, anyway?
Live updates begin below.
4:26 PM – The theater is filling up already, although I don't know when the conference will begin. I'm just still thinking about Skittles the tiger and all the magical interactions we will have together.
5:01 – Ubisoft kicks things off with the first truly awesome-looking Kinect title of the show – looks like either a spiritual sequel to or a total ripoff of Sega's classic Rez. The guy on stage is moving his hand around to control a reticle that targets enemies and shoots them all to the beat of a thumping techno soundtrack. If we were at a Sega presser, I'd say this was Rez 2 for sure, but we're not, so it isn't.
5:04 – This demo of not-Rez is going on for a while, but I don't care. This looks really fun. It's called Child of Eden. Oh hey, the guy playing was Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of Rez! Why is nobody surprised! Oh, the game is based on synaesthesia! Just like some other game! Still looks awesome. Star of E!'s "The Soup," Joel McHale, is on stage ready to entertain us and host the press conference.
5:10 – The theme of this year's event is "Games You Can Feel." Appropriate considering how many of them will probably use motion control. But first, let's watch a kickass trailer for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Ok, don't mind if I do!
5:14 – The trailer segues into gameplay. Ezio's Villa, the one he spent so much time building up in the previous game, is being destroyed by the Templars. Horrors. Time to assassinate some people. You can now bring your horse into the city walls and ride it down the street, if you want. That is not exactly stealthy, though, you know? You'd probably get spotted right away, on the horse.
5:16 – They're building in new gameplay types – for instance, Ezio is shown taking down a building by firing a massive cannon at it. "Multiple new gadgets and machinery at his disposal."
5:20 – "For the first time ever, you can prove your skills and abilities against other players around the world... introducing an innovative multiplayer experience to the Assassin's Creed franchise."
5:21 – And now, we go to a 21st-century urban jungle, says Joel McHale. What'll this be?
5:22 – Oh, it's Shaun White Skateboarding. And here comes Shaun White to tell us all about it.
5:26 – Long story short, the game has a "transformation" feature that allows you to transform the environment as you play. The world starts out covered in government propaganda, devoid of fun. Your first mission is to influence the citizens of the world. As you do awesome flip tricks on your skateboard, color returns to the world a la Wizard of Oz. If Wizard of Oz had skateboards, I mean. And Shaun White.
5:30 – You can create rails and skate lines as you play the game, creating a big ol' skate park of your own design just by skateboarding. Definitely not your ordinary skateboard game, that's for sure.
5:33 – Demos on the show floor in 3-D and one on the Wii, they say.
Joel McHale probably going to announce another game soon, I bet. No, wait, a bunch of people are playing Laser Tag or something in the theater now. Oh, it's called Battle Tag. What the heck just happened? "It's something lots of gamers have been waiting for," says the producer. Really? Oh, apparently it's a Laser Tag style game that records your win/loss record automatically via a computer program.
5:40 – New game called innergy, which is about relieving people's stress. Oh look, you use the Innergy Sensor, which sits on your fingertip! Where have I seen that before? That's right, Tetris 64. The game, which is running on a PC laptop, then has you breathe in and out to help you relax. It has colorful graphics which are probably also designed to make you feel less stressed. This is a good climbdown after Child of Eden.
5:45 – A reel of game developers talking about motion controls and how they affect games.'
5:48 – Now that we know all about how motion controls affect games, let's watch a trailer for Motion Sports, one of the many different collections of sports mini-games that will launch with Kinect this fall. It has skiing. It has soccer. It has American football.
5:50 – The exact same people who did the live demo of Your Shape during the Microsoft press conference come out to do what is probably the exact same live demo. It still says "Project Natal" on the demo. It is the exact same live demo, except now with humorous commentary by McHale.
5:54 – Please read our Xbox 360 liveblog to find out what happened.
5:56 – Hey, it's time for the Rabbids to come back. What will those insane lagomorphs get up to this time?
5:57 – Apparently they will build a time machine out of a washing machine and go back in time and harass people through the ages. Raving Rabbids Travel in Time is what it is called. Available November 9 on Wii.
5:59 – Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. McHale very excited about this, visibly filled with a sort of authentic enthusiasm he didn't have for, for example, Motion Sports.
6:00 – Live demo of the game, and how the super invisible suits that the Ghosts wear let them sneak around and peg guys in the back of the head whenever they want.
6:06 – So it's a stealth game? They run through a bunch of iterations of killing people silently. Quite a cinematic sort of shooter. Wonder if that's just the scripted E3 demo or whether this is how the game will really feel.
6:08 – The game will feature a 4-player co-op campaign and stereoscopic 3-D.
And now for a game with high-speed car chases. Ok. Hey, it takes place in San Francisco, apparently. I'm from there.
6:10 – It's a high-speed chase across the Golden Gate bridge. Several police cars versus an armored cars filled with escaped convicts. Who is the hero? You can never tell with these things. It's Driver: San Francisco. They are going to talk about it.
6:14 – You can drive everywhere in San Francisco, apparently. I want to drive to my house!
6:16 – We're coming up on the 80-minute mark. McHale seems to be wrapping it up. No, the CEO of Ubisoft is coming out onto the stage. Yves Guillemot is here to tell us some things. I wonder what these things are.
6:17 – Oh man, three new games. First is a download title called Project DUST, by Eric Chahi, the creator of Out of This World. It's about a member of a tribe of people on the verge of extinction. Available Spring 2011.
6:18 – The next project is a set of tools being created by Rayman creator Michel Ancel. Apparently it's a toolset that allow artists to easily create interactive games. They're showing a game created with these tools – it's a cel-shaded Rayman platform game. Side-scrolling Rayman platformer. I know at least one person who will be very happy about this. Actually, the audience is applauding it, so they're all really happy about it too. Rayman: Origins. Apparently the game is created by only 5 people.
6:22 – Ubisoft expects to have 10 million customers for its loyalty program Uplay by the end of the year. New project is called "ManiaPlanet," which will let you create gameplay and share it with others. Apparently it's by the makers of TrackMania, the build-your-own-level PC racing game.
6:24 – ManiaPlanet will feature racing, shooters and RPGs that you can create maps and levels for. Shootmania will go into beta in 2011, Questmania coming soon.
6:25 – Guillemot has a One More Thing announcement. "We've signed a legend," he said. It'll be launched at the end of the year. "As you learn these moves, you can learn them from somebody who has done it the best." What could he be talking about? It's... It's the Michael Jackson game. This has been rumored for a while, right? People are dancing on stage. But I see no videogame. Just dancers.
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6:30 – The end, and my battery's dead. Bye!
Photos: James Merithew/Wired.com
