E3 2009

LOS ANGELES — Taking a videogame franchise to the next level is a proven draw at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

At this year’s show, developers hope to catch gamers’ attention with new offerings in the Tony Hawk, Mario and Rock Band series.

These highly anticipated pleasures and more await the thousands of gamers and members of the press who descend on the 2009 show, where they are greeted by massive installations and ample opportunities to demo the latest, greatest games.

At a recent developer roundtable with Shigeru Miyamoto, the famed director revealed the first details on an as yet unnamed Zelda title scheduled to come to Wii in 2010. The title will definitely use the recently released Wii MotionPlus, and, depending on the popularity of the controller, it may even require the peripheral.
During the discussion, Miyamoto briefly showed an image from the game featuring a mature Link barely visible through a broken wall. Although the picture only showed Link from behind, a short girl in a long robe stood in full view at Link's back. Wearing a crystal necklace and emanating a blue aura, she gave off an otherworldly look -- akin to Zora from Ocarina of Time.

Nintendo's E3 2009 press conference has come and gone, and it ran the gamut of the familiar and the surprising, the expected and the completely bizarre. In typical press conference fashion, the show closed with the most exciting announcement: Metroid: Other M, a new entry in the series developed by Tecmo's Team Ninja. Other big game announcements included Super Mario Galaxy 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Golden Sun DS, but probably what will become the biggest watercooler moment of the show was the reveal of the Wii Vitality Sensor: a device that reads a gamer's pulse, but no details were given on what kind of practical applications that'll actually lead to.

Kratos squares off against the Gods in the third installment of the God of War trilogy

What's the game about? It's the final game in the initial God of War trilogy, with Kratos and the Titans fighting Zeus and the Gods. You know this. Big new features this time around include playing entire levels on the backs of gigantic Titans as they scale Mount Olympus, fighting large numbers of (sometimes organized) enemies with new crowd control techniques, and flying vertically when you strap on a pair of wings and enter a wind tunnel. Read this preview from February for the rundown.