E3 2012 Day 2

Another busy day in down town LA at the Convention Center. Staples Center is directly next door and the LA Kings played (but they lost) so the parking in the surrounding ares was increased to absurd amounts. The Kings have one more games to go so lets see if they can win the Stanley Cup. Anyway, today I had the chance to play a short part of the new Harry Potter for Kinect. I have to say it was a little more fun than I had anticipated. The section of the game that I demoed involved Harry running down a bridge while being chased. While moving across the bridge it was falling apart due to being on fire. As debris fell, it landed in ways that you need to either move around it, jump over it or duck under it. At times you had to turn around to cast spells at your pursuers. So as I played I ducked, jumped, moved left and right and swung my hand in the air as if casting spells from my make-believe wand in order to complete the level. Had it not been for the Kinect I would definitely not played this game. The Kinect made it fun and it will be needed to market this title, but the experience is what counted.

http://dai.ly/KIkrsX

As I walked the expo floor I found Band Fuse. This is a take off the Guitar Hero genre where you play an actual guitar and you play to a song. The notes to play scroll across the screen in tablature format and the difficulty levels are easily adjusted from a novice soho know very little to nothing about playing guitar. To a pro level where it scrolls every note that makes up the guitar part of the song. Developers Realta Entertainment Group made this game to match the song as close as possible so you can actually learn the song and play the real notes to the song. So there is a level of skill that can be attained from playing the game. The game has some great features, you can record yourself playing a song and listen back after your done or there is a jam type mode where a pre-recorded track plays and you can then jam along to it and even record it. Once recorded yo can send it to whom ever you want and they can record their track to it and send it back. It’s like a recording studio on your game console. It took some getting used to for me. I play guitar but I am not used to seeing the notes fly across a screen in that way but its a lot of fun.

On the way into West Hall there was a large Halo 4 screen drop set up. There, someone in Spartan armor resembling the Master Chief was available for photo ops. Pretty cool, I thought it was a statue (as in previous years) so it surprised me that it was a real person moving around. Check out the pic.

Just to share a couple of game play experiences with you, I’ll leave it there and finish this off with some pics.

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