Pardon the excitement there, it actually wasn't excitement. Namco Bandai's debut Wii U game is actually called Tank! Tank! Tank!
It looks like the union of a 90s arcade game, Facebook titles and my worst nightmares about giant mechanical spiders. Which now I see them together doesn't look like such a bad thing.
Giant AAA games tend to dominate the discourse during E3 week. But sometimes it's only the indie-developed titles that give you the buzz you're looking for. Say you're a fan of great animation, Wu-Tang style hip-hop-inflected feudal Japanese soundtracks and turn-based strategy. Nothing shown at Microsoft's de-press event scratched your itch. But 17-Bit's Skulls of the Shogun has you covered. This trailer shows off a bit of the humor and combat that the indie title will be bringing to Xbox Live later this year.
Ubisoft's ZombiU had one of the more interesting trailers from yesterday, but, um, all we saw was cinematic stuff. Nothing from the actual game. This? This is nothing but the actual game.
OK, Nintendo (and Ubisoft), you know what, you want to sell people on just what that second screen can do, this is helping.
Ah, Pikmin. It's been too long, my little friends. Too long.
See the third game in the series' reveal on the Wii from earlier today here.
Nintendo Land's Donkey Kong's Crash Course has nothing to do with bongos, nor the jungle.
The player controls a vehicle by tilting the Wii U Gamepad and pushing the shoulder buttons to control various obstacles. The object of the game is to collect bananas without tipping the vehicle over. The screen on the gamepad provides a close-up of the action, while the TV simultaneously shows a layout of the course.
Watch Stephen try his best to defeat the obstacle course in the video above.
One of my main concerns about the Wii U is that it has the same controller-syncing problems that required lots of one-button manual recalibration of the Wii Motion Plus Remote in Wii Sports Resort and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
The problem is that the Wii U sometimes wants you to point the GamePad at the TV, but the GamePad doesn't have a Wii Remote-style pointing sensor. So, the gyro sensors in the GamePad have to calibrate a center position and then try to help the Wii U to remember that relative center point. Before long, it fails to track accurately.
Watch the video to see how that goes, and note that it is not a fault of the gyro itself, which in several Wii U games I played today is easily able to understand the tilt and rotation of the GamePad. It just can't remember it's relative position to a TV very well.
The video here should make this clear.
Here's your first look at some of the hideous monsters in the upcoming Doom 3 BFG Edition, a rerelease of Id's first-person shooter that will be out this fall for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Sadly, no head-mounted displays or armor-mounted flashlights here. Just ugly monsters. Ugly, ugly monsters.
If this new perk screen is any indication, vampires will play much differently than the other races and classes in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Let the feeding begin.
Check out the rest of these new images for a peek into the first upcoming DLC pack for Bethesda's role-playing game, Dawnguard, which will be out this summer.