E3 2012: Microsoft Press Conference -- 5 Biggest Winners & Losers

With another Microsoft E3 press briefing in the books, who are the biggest winners and losers? We were live in the audience at the Galen Center and we're ready to pick the top -- and bottom -- five. First, let's meet the conference's biggest winners. Click over to page 2 for the losers.

5. Xbox SmartGlass

Let's be honest: the concept of a Wii U-like tablet application meant to interact with your games and entertainment apps could flame out in spectacular fashion in an Xbox Live Vision type of way. We're going to take the SmartGlass-half-full approach here, however (sorry). Though we could not possibly care less about having our tablet tell us where we are in Westeros while we're watching Game of Thrones, the gaming possibilities here could bear tasty fruit. Drawing up a play (or even just sorting through your playbook quickly) in Madden NFL 13? Love it. Having a Halo Bible-esque information database that interacts with what we're seeing on Halo 4's mysterious new planet of Requiem? We're in. Naturally, Microsoft only mentioned a Windows 8 version of this, but they're going to have to swallow their pride and put out an iOS version of SmartGlass if they want to have any hope whatsoever of this catching on.

4. South Park: The Stick of Truth

To paraphrase from one of the greatest comedies of our generation, that was frickin' sweet. Trey Parker and Matt Stone themselves came out on stage to introduce the game, eschewing the teleprompter and mocking the SmartGlass demo that preceded it to boot. Better, their game looks amazing...not literally, of course, as the duo were quick to mock the "sh*tty" look of their own show. But to that end, the game does, in fact, look exactly like the show, and is fantastically structured in such a way that they're able to incorporate nearly everything and everyone in the South Park universe, from Mr. Slave to Jesus to a fully rendered and navigable town. And even in the trailer, Parker and Stone's humor brightly shone through in the game. Screw you guys, we're going home...to watch this trailer over and over again.

3. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist

What do you get when you take some of the best elements from every Splinter Cell game so far? You get knifed in the face by Blacklist. Yes, the Tri-Goggled One is back, and he's got a knife to cut through cloth, Sticky Shockers to zap enemies dumb enough to stand in pools of water, the Mark and Execute gameplay introduced in Splinter Cell: Conviction, and -- oh yeah -- Spies vs. Mercenaries multiplayer mode. You'll also get a healthy dose of painful interrogations that always end up with enemies having their bones snapped like twigs and/or their eyeballs gouged out by Sam's knife. One potentially giant problem: longtime Sam Fisher voice actor Michael Ironside was noticeably absent. If he doesn't end up lending his signature pipes to Sam in the final game, we're going to (seriously consider but not actually) cancel our pre-order.

2. Halo 4

A lot is riding on Halo 4 for Microsoft. It's a new development team at 343 Industries and the start of a new trilogy aimed at carrying the franchise into the next generation of consoles. It's also the long-awaited return of Master Chief after the previous pair of Halo titles were clearly lacking in the badass hero department. The good news is that 343 came out smelling like a rose after debuting the first campaign footage of their debut project. A dark, mysterious new Forerunner enemy was revealed as Master Chief trudged through the jungles of Requiem in pursuit of a fallen UNSC ship. The sharp new graphics engine (particularly the lighting) clearly separated Halo 4 from its predecessors, while the from-scratch sound effects rocked the entire arena. More importantly, the new Forerunner weapon we got to see -- it literally pieced itself together in Chief's hands -- proved to be a badass railgun-y boomstick.

1. Tomb Raider

Sorry, Master Chief, but the lovely Lara stole the Microsoft Press Briefing...and our hearts. We first saw a promising "vertical slice" of the Tomb Raider reboot a full year ago, and it appears developer Crystal Dynamics has spent the 365 days since wringing every last bit of potential out of Croft's re-imagining. Visually, the game looks almost next-gen -- you probably wouldn't believe us if we told you that this game is built off of the same engine used to power Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Gorgeous vistas, incredibly detailed character models, and stunning art direction highlight the graphics, while gameplay is simply off the charts. Everything was on display, from bow-and-arrow combat to platforming to free-roaming elements. And to think that this game has another 7-8 months of development time and polish left. Tomb Raider was unquestionably the highlight of the Microsoft Press Conference.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/05/e3-2012-microsoft-press-conference-5-biggest-winners-losers

Alan Wake's American Nightmare Review

With a few notable exceptions, video games – even the ones that brand themselves as "horror" – aren't that scary. This is also true, by and large, of movies, books, you name it. It's hard to scare people, to really scare them; just as hard as it is to make them laugh or cry. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Alan Wake's American Nightmare, much like the game it expands upon (Alan Wake), isn't frightening in the slightest. What come as a shocker, however, is the fact that it's so damn fun.

Presenting itself as an episode of a Twilight Zone-esque television show called "Night Springs," complete with a Rod Serling soundalike narrator, Alan Wake's American Nightmare sees the titular hero facing off against an evil manifestation of himself, called Mr. Scratch. Scratch has taken up residence in a small Arizona town, and has turned most of the population into zombie-like hostiles called "the taken." Much of Alan Wake's American Nightmare's gameplay involves dealing with the taken, who attack Wake at regular intervals. The taken are usually protected by a cloak of shadows, which must be "burned" away using Wake's flashlight beam before he can then employ firearms to permanently put them on the other side of the dirt. Dodging enemy melee attacks is a heavily emphasized element of the gameplay: successfully doing it both slows down time and lets Wake get some distance from bad guys.

At first, this dodge-and-shoot, third-person zombie bashing is a pretty cool mechanic, as the variety of conventional and light-based weapons (i.e., flares, flashbangs) and the game's first three maps provide a solid initial challenge (along with a decent, if rather pathetically Stephen King-wannabe-ish storyline). But things start to lose their luster when you play those first three maps a second time, immediately after completing them. And then, after completing those, you play them a third time. Sure, Alan Wake's American Nightmare truncates them a bit and saves you some time, but you're still playing the same maps, fighting basically the same enemies, and finding the same equipment, three damn times in a row. Even if the story weren't told through the clumsy mechanic of finding lost journal entries, it would still wear thinner than a politician's veneer of trustworthiness after two complete repetitions of the same stuff.

And the same is true of the gameplay, at least in the story mode. There are only so many times you can dodge the same arc of electricity, or fight the same zombified fireman, before you start to ask yourself if your leisure time couldn't be better spent watching your hard drive defragment. But, weirdly, I did keep on doing it. And I kept coming back again, and again. There's something bizarrely enthralling about Alan Wake's American Nightmare – something that drew me in, despite its on-paper shortcomings.

Part of the reason for this is that the game's simple, third-person shooter mechanic is surprisingly fun to play with. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the game's Arcade Mode. Here, Wake is pitted for 10 minutes against waves of increasingly difficult zombies (or one continuous wave if you play in Nightmare difficulty), on small maps strewn with items and ammo that you can collect between waves -- or during, if you're a true badass. Points are earned for enemies killed, and streaks of killings build up your score multiplier, as does successfully dodging enemy attacks. Like the Survival Mode in Resident Evil 5 (although it lacks that game's co-operative multiplayer), something about Alan Wake's American Nightmare's Arcade Mode keeps you coming back for more, to see if you can't surpass your score and kick even more ass in ten minutes. Because weapons are unlocked in Arcade Mode by collecting more journal entries in Story Mode, you're encouraged to play both, and online leaderboards are there so you can compare your abilities with others' as you get better and better.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/29/alan-wakes-american-nightmare-review-2