E for All Wrap Up!
Thought you guys might want to see a few pictures from E for All as well as our thoughts on the show (aside from what we said on the podcast). The picture above shows Ray’s face of triumph after beating FlyWrench for the first time (he has since beaten the game in under 7 minutes). FlyWrench was his pick of the show, and for good reason. With basic graphics and basic controls it still manages to be wholly engrossing and very addictive. It’s free, so check it out!
My pick of the show goes to Machinarium, a truly beautiful point-and-click adventure from Amanita Design. At E for All, there were always people checking out the game for the visuals alone, but the puzzles were very smart as well. Look for the game in the first half of 2009, but in the meantime, you can check out their previous adventures Samorost 1 & 2 here. The Samorost 2 demo is fairly long and quite fun. The game is only $6.90, so if you like supporting small game developers, now’s your chance! Samorost 1 is free, but is very short (shorter than the sequel’s demo) and not as good as what I’ve seen with the other games.
Here’s a lower point of the show: me playing a cell phone game. Actually, Samsung put together quite a nice booth, the question is ‘why’? Like Namco did last year with its cell phone game booth, Samsung went all out, showing off other publisher’s games on their cell phones. In the picture I’m playing Sonic at the Olympic Games, and no, that’s not a typo, Mario got left out this time, probably because Nintendo holds their franchises hostage to their own hardware and Sega whores out Sonic to whoever will take him. Anyway, it wasn’t even a terrible game, so that’s good news!
Here’s Ray rocking out to some Linkin Park (not a great Guitar Hero song). We both tried the drums as well and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. This was by far the most crowded part of E for All. Ray was a big fan of the new guitar and we both thought the cymbals on the drum brought something fresh to the game (although it took a minute to figure out).
Just for the sake of comparison: This is a picture of just a portion of Brawl at E for All in 2007…
And this is a picture of the entirety of Brawl at E for All 2008, with just one controller. To be fair though, we really didn’t expect to see Brawl at all, it was only there because Target was displaying games they thought would sell well at there on-site store.
This was a pretty cool display by Intel and Dell I believe. They had two full-size race cars to sit in with working pedals and steering wheel with some sort of PC racing game (not even sure which one). As you shifted gears going faster, the wheel would actually get harder to turn, which was pretty cool. As you can see, Ray was really into it because his mouth is hanging wide open, the picture of concentration.
Here’s me trying it out. The only real bummer was that it was really hard to see the road ahead. I think it had to do with the fact that the wheel was shown on-screen, which didn’t make sense because I had a wheel right in front of me! I couldn’t figure out how to change the camera angle, so there were plenty of mishaps on the track.
That’s about it!
Nice pictures guys! Regardless of how much it sucked this year, I’d still like to go to E For All (or something like it) sometime. Oh, and Tim, you look way different from these pictures and the one from last year. Does the hat really make that much of a difference?
Of course it does, It’d be like seeing Ray without the Knubby elbows! Tim IS the beanie cap, just as is Ray the knubby elbows. I’m currently playing Flywrench and I’m at either Venus or Earth right now. I’ll post my time when i’m done
I was thinking the same thing. XD
As for everything else, spiffiness, but yeah, I probably would not enjoyed it had I gone, next time I’ll just find a way to go to Nintendo’s Media Summit. XD
So on a scale of 1-10 (for cell games)
how would you rate Sonic at the Olympic games?
Such concentration, such intensity is noticeable in your expressions when you two play games.
Hey dudes, just wanna say; Fly Wrench: 29.01 (not great, but first time through)
Another random note is that I re-busted out Super Mario Galaxy early this week, and finally got the remaining stars, bringing me up to 120. Man, that game has some serious polish. SO AWESOME! Still one of only like 3 or 4 games that make an obvious jump up from Gamecube visuals. (Why is the Gamecube so awesome!? Just look at the Rogue squadron games, or Zelda WW/TP… there are VERY few games on Wii that can touch that kind of caliber.) I also busted out Zack and Wiki again. Still need to finish that!
BTW, your last comic was cool, so NCG! So sorry E for all wasn’t so hot. I’d say better luck next time, but as we all suspect… there probably won’t be one.
42:33 for me. That got really hard near the end! I spent probably half that time on the level with the spinning thing at the beginning and the guys that shoot you in the room down the bottom (second to last level I think, not counting the sun). It was a little frustrating, but I was determined to beat it! Ray must be some kind of robot to do it in under 7 minutes.
Flywrench in 16:49 on the first try. Mercury must have been about 10-12 minutes of that! I can see how it could be done in 7 minutes, but I’d have to have a very lucky first run through mercury.
The Sun?!? Way to spoil the plot!
[spoiler](kidding, of course =)[/spoiler]
Tim, without the beanie, you look just like one of my friends.
my Flywrench time the first run was 30 minutes, almost half of Ray’s time 😉
Well, technically, the time you see in the picture can’t all be attributed to Ray. See, he took over when someone else got up, so who knows how long they had been playing!
BTW, my time is now at around 11 minutes.
Fake. No Beanies.
hey, this is the first time ive seen a picture of tim =D