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Not much to say here, but a longer trailer from the newest Final Fantasy sequel came out today during E3. Square Enix hasn't gotten much play in the big E3 media so far, so this is a bit under the radar.

If you're looking forward to the sequel, the trailer can be found at Gamespot.

This was a bit of an underwhelming E3 day, at least for me. Let's hope for the best tomorrow!

Source: Gamespot

Why would one stay after hours to watch Sony's E3 2011 presser? Probably to either a) try to get a look at Kevin Butler or b) see if Sony apologizes for losing control of their security. You didn't get a), and you got b) out of the way just as fast as they possibly could do it. Blink and it's gone.

For me, I just sat through it and I'm not quite sure if there is a c), myself. I thought the overall presentation was pretty bland, though Sony will clearly score a lot of points with some gamers for not marrying their information to the Move the way Microsoft did Kinect. However, they might well lose points with a variety of other gamers for sticking so close to the handheld.

Some of Sony's games looked pretty great. I've never played an Uncharted, but Uncharted 3 does look solid in a crowded third-person, over-the-shoulder adventure genre. Resistance 3 looks like a perfectly adequate FPS. Everything is starting to look the same, though, and that wasn't helped by following Microsoft. You can show lots of adventure games and lots of FPSes, but after a while the brief time that each game has to show its uniqueness just fails, and I really didn't see anything during the PlayStation 3 portion of the presentation that really lept out as surprising or groundbreaking.

Once the Vita emerged, though, it got pretty interesting as long as you like handhelds. The tech behind the Vita looked pretty great in the live demos, though I for one have never been fully convinced by backside touchpads (fnar). The new handheld looks very much like a PSP, with the crosspad, four buttons, and two shoulders of the current PSP. After that, they added a second analog stick and made both sticks look more like DualShock sticks, made the screen multitouch-capable, and even added a back multitouch panel without a screen and front and back cameras.

The games shown live looked fanastic, nearly like PlayStation 3 games, and it seems like the time the devs have had with the development devices and SDK has paid off. I think the AT&T offering will not help the device; I would guess that the data plans will not be reasonably priced, and with no 4G availability, there will almost surely be a new version in just a couple years. PlayStation Suite, also on the mobile front, seems like a neat idea, but how many Android phones will really have the ability to control games that originated on PlayStation platforms?

Two things to point out here: one, there was pretty much no Square Enix here at all. That's two out of three down and barely any mention of Squenix - not a great sign, in my opinion. Two, please, please, don't let devs give presentations. God bless them, they make good games. They're not public speakers.

Microsoft finished up their press conference about an hour and a half ago, leaving CoNchat generally underwhelmed. Of course, for the people in there who remain avid RPG gamers, the Microsoft speech tends to be a bit of a famine, so maybe we're not all the target market for such things.

It was second in the show, but since it's the closest to Square Enix they had, we'll lead with Tomb Raider. It was a very pretty game, and looked very much like what you'd want in a Tomb Raider made fifteen years after the original, with an added little dash of bondage at the beginning. If you ever wanted to see Lara be trussed upside down, have to light herself on fire to escape, and then fall and break a rib, then, Eidos is bringing you just what you want.

Microsoft and their partners covered quite a few games, and among them were the ones you fully expected to see, starting with a full ten minutes of Modern Warfare 3, which looked pretty much like Modern Warfare 2, if you ask me. The post-Bungie Halo era moved on with both a remake of the very first game and an announcement for Halo 4. Every one of these games got a huge reaction from the crowd - call me a complainer, but I didn't see any of that stuff do anything so interesting that it demanded screams of joy. Someone thinks it's truly groundbreaking, though, or the excitement of being in the room with such a big screen really added to the impact.

Microsoft showed off their new dashboard, with an emphasis on the new non-gaming or gaming-related content to be on offer. They made a very big deal out of the addition of YouTube, and a Kinected Bing application to find games and media available for the Xbox. They also did a lot of talk about live television over Xbox, but honestly, I'm not going to get very excited about that; they still can't even give me live ESPN3 due to an ongoing dispute with Time Warner Cable that has been going on for almost a year now.

The rest was a big push to get Kinect more on the minds of not only kids and casual gamers, but the "hardcore" set as well. Games like Ghost Recon, Fable, Ryse, Star Wars (which, by the way, looked just awful, to me) and even Minecraft are looking to really make people take Kinect seriously, while a new sports game, a Sesame Street game, and a Disneyland exploration application/game will appeal to the casual and younger sets. I have to say, the last two excited me the most, but that might just be because I have baby on the brain.

What'd you guys think? Does Microsoft have anything that excites you for the next year?

Quote of the Microsoft conference came in from CoNChat, not surprisingly. It was Kappa the Imp, responding to the Sesame Street Kinect game:

[12:39] Kappa: Who else can imagine all their pothead friends going CRAZY over this

Square Enix are preparing for E3, of course; it officially starts next Tuesday. For us, they're mainly doing it with a microsite that, as of this writing, doesn't work. If you care to find a metaphor in that for your faith in the company, well, I won't stop you. Hopefully it comes back online soon, though, as the site last year was really pretty nice, as I recall.

Square Enix are only talking about a few of the games that they'll be showing, and I haven't yet found any mention of a standalone presser that will be aired anywhere public. I don't believe they did one last year, either, so we'll have to feast on scraps that we get second-hand. For now, though, we do know of several games that will appear; of most interest to RPG fans will be Final Fantasy XIII-2 and WAKFU. However, Tomb Raider, the new Hitman, Deus Ex, Dead Island, and the new 3DS game Heroes of Ruin also headline the offering. There's no mention of Type-0 or Dream Drop Distance in the press release, but there's little doubt that they'll be in the booth in some fashion, surely, along with some other big-ticket games that escape my mind at the moment.

As for CoN, we're going to cover E3 the way we did last year, I think, as much as possible. That means that we'll be watching the big three press conferences in chat, as well as posting live thoughts about the offerings to Twitter and Facebook. After each of the big pressers, one of us will write up a kinda-bloggy recap for CoN news as well. If you want to participate, all you have to do is follow us on Twitter (@cavesofnarshe) or on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/cavesofnarshe), come to chat to make snide comments about the games you're seeing, or watch this space for the wrap-up news.

If you're on Facebook or Twitter, we'd love it if you'd reference us in your own tweets or posts about E3, or if you'd retweet or share our comments to your own network. Help us keep our following growing by making sure all seven of your friends know about us!

Source: Square Enix, Kotaku

Slowly but surely, Distant Worlds is becoming less distant to more and more Final Fantasy fans, as the tour adds more dates that cover more geographical areas in North America. Sorry, overseas fans, but no new dates for you in this update; however, as consolation, the DVDs I mentioned in my last Distant Worlds post are now available from AmaCoN US and AmaCoN UK.

A brief rundown of the new dates:

• Houston, 16 July 2011
• Vancouver, 27 July 2011 (with Uematsu)
• Baltimore, 9 and 10 September 2011 (with Uematsu)
• Los Angeles, 5 November 2011
• Kitchener, Ontario, 28 February 2012
• St. Louis, Missouri, 23 and 24 March, 2012
• Toronto, 31 March 2012 (with Uematsu)

For presale dates and all other information, hit the Distant Worlds site below.

Source: Distant Worlds

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, the 2007 PSP remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, will be released on iOS compatible devices in June or July of this year. First announced to be coming to those platforms at E3 2010, soon iPhone and iPad users will be able to enjoy the game with a new touch-friendly interface and slightly wider viewing window.

Square-Enix has not given an official, concrete release date for the game yet, but promises the iPhone version will land in June or July. The iPad version may take a little longer to hit Apple's app store due to the challenges presented by developing for a the larger screen, but one of the game's producers assured fans that the gap between formats will not be a long one.

Source: Square Enix's Facebook page