The Top Ten things about E3 2006

8: Final Fantasy XIII / Final Fantasy Versus XIII

Because SquareEnix likes to torture us, they decided to show, amongst what seemed like one hundred Final Fantasy 7 related games, a little teaser for Final Fantasy XIII. While most journalists complained (as FFXII hasn't been released statewide yet, though it will be released very soon), I have to say that, considering it was generated on the Playstation 3, I was absolutely floored at not only the quality, but the speed the game ran. In no way did it chug, there were no cheap tricks such as in older Final Fantasy games, and when I was done, when I realized I would be playing that in a year or two, I was rather excited.

Rather than gush about the quality any more, I'll use this space to quickly explain what the hell “Versus XIII” is, because I have gotten many questions regarding it. There will be two Final Fantasy XIII games- XIII, an RPG with the famous feather-haired female from the screenshots, and “Versus XIII”, which will be done by the Kingdom Hearts directors, featuring a more action-based experience. This is obviously spreading themselves a little far, but we can at least expect a new (And not FFVII) experience from Squaresoft sometime in 2007 or 2008.

7: Gears of War

While it was nowhere near the most phenomenal game at E3, one of the things that really floored us was Gears of War, shown at the XBOX 360 press conference. With almost perfect graphics and the famous Cliff Blezenski touch that we've gotten used to from the Unreal series, the Gametrash staff was truly interested in the future of this series.

But there are some small questions I've had since day one, mainly centered around the game itself. Originally, Gears of War was reputed to be on the PS3, but suddenly it appears on the 360, and retains the same graphical style- which is why a lot of Microsoft fan boys are now claiming similarity to the Playstation 3 system. While the graphics were wonderful, I somewhat expected something unique to the game, instead of appearing like a run-of-the-mill shooter. We will see- but there is no doubt that Gears of War will be a big seller for the 360.

6: G4 embarrassing itself on camera

One of the funniest moments of E3 was watching miscellaneous G4 announcers pretend like they really cared about E3, and knew anything about it more than what was on the teleprompter. Everyone knows I hate G4, but it was really showing it's ineptitude at E3 this year- not only pimping out it's own shows, but dragging in everyone else to try to look like they were part of the crowd. One day in particular, they actually spend 99.9% of the time talking about the (mediocre) booth babes, when they could have been doing something else, LIKE SHOWING VIDEO GAMES.

The best way to prove my point here is to say that they actually hired Gilbert Gottfried, the annoying voiced man himself, to interject humor into their zombie-like production- and he couldn't have saved it lest he dropped his pants and just ran around dry-humping the booth babes he was trying to interview.

And, that was about it. Besides pimping out their own shows and the new cast member (A cover girl from FHM, which makes her as qualified as I would be showing up on MTV), G4 did nothing but quickly glance over video games and bitch about the smell. Honestly, I could do better if I had a whole bottle of Vodka and had three large burly Russian men beating me till I bled. It might have been more entertaining, at least.

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