There comes a time in the week to reflect on what got into my reporterās notebook but didnāt turn into Kotaku blog posts. Shall we?
Games I Didnāt Touch: I saw the fall line-ups for a trio of publishers in New York this past week. Majesco, Sony and Ubisoft were showing more than 30 games between them. Maybe even 50. I didnāt count. There were a lot. Iām still in the process of getting at least 10 posts out of them. When you go to these events, you size them up and decide what you think you can afford to skip. At Sony, for example, I skipped the new Buzz games in the interest of time. And I skipped Brutal Legend on PlayStation 3, because the demo covered the same content from the Xbox 360 presentation I received of the game a couple of weeks ago. At Ubi I skipped their DS games, including Cop: The Recruit. Just didnāt have the time or the expectation that itād be worth it. I always worry that I guess wrong, but I have to guess nonetheless.
Games I Canāt Preview: There were even games that I did play at the aforementioned events that I wonāt be previewing. Sometimes, I just donāt think I get enough info on them or have sufficient expertise in them to write an informative post. All I could say about the new Ubisoft Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, for example, is that it can be mistaken for a Smash Bros. clone (some of its creators worked on that last Nintendo brawler), that the Ubi rep showing me the game said its combat is more complex than Smash and that both the Ubi rep and ex-Newsweek reporter NāGai Croal beat me in the game. At the Sony event I had a good time fighting as God of Warās Kratos against a computer-controlled Kratos on the new PSP version of Soul Calibur, but, again, I donāt have much more to write about it. The game, which is called Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny, had the best graphics Iāve seen on the PSP, but it also only had to render two characters on the machineās screen. These observations do not a post make. There are other games I tried that I wonāt be covering, but some of them donāt even make this Notebook Dump. (There are also games I played that Iām saving my coverage of until next week. Iāll let you be surprised as to which those are.)
Late To The iPhone: The other thing I didnāt address in my posts this week ā because I didnāt know how to write something fresh about it ā was the beginning of my experimentation with iPhone gaming. Last Saturday, on a train from New York to Philadelphia to go see this (yes, that), I decided Iād try a bunch of iPhone games. I loaded my phone with a selection of games that I based primarily on the suggestions of reporter-friendās Patrick Klepek and John Davison as well as from Davisonās superb list of top iPhone games. (Looks like he just did another!) I feel like itād be old hat to ask for suggestions or to run through everything I tried in a standalone post. But if youāre interested, I sampled: Drop 7 (fun), Fieldrunners (too easy), Flight Control (fun but blocked by my fingers), Galcon (fun, but I prefer similar PC game Dyson ā try it!), geoDefense Lite (didnāt grab me), Trixel (good, but not my thing), Crystal Defenders Vanguard Storm (surprisingly cool), and Zenonia (ruined by its need for a virtual d-pad). Still need to try a bunch of others. I was excited to try what I understood to be the best games of an existing platform. I havenāt had the opportunity to be late to a platform since I got a PS2 in early 2002. How this will affect what I cover, I cannot say.
And thatās enough notebook-dumping for the week. Next week should be fun. But right now the weekend beckons. As does the Final Fantasy WiiWare tower defense game, My Life As A Darklord, that I was supposed to review for today. Iām late. Donāt tell anyone!
(I snapped the photo for this post in the elevator of the building where Sony was having their NYC event.)
