E3 '10: Hudson Booth Tour

Few folks know how to bring old school gaming like Hudson. From their eclectic collection of titles, to their willingness to expand on them with new technologies and features, Hudson certainly made for one of my more interesting stops on the E3 floor by combining the latest and greatest tech with a rich heritage of characters.

First up was a pair of Deca Sports titles. With the third installment in the increasingly popular Wii line Hudson brings players 10 new games to play, each backed up by the incredibly accurate Motion Plus. While Nintendo's latest attachment isn't required to play the game, adding one into the mix makes things much smoother all around with fewer mistakes. Add in the fact that this entry includes manly man sports like log cutting, and you've got fun party title to play with friends. Never overlooking an opportunity to make a fool of myself in public, I moved onto Deca Sports Freedom which takes advantage of Microsoft's Kinect. Maybe it was because this was the first demo that I played that used this cutting edge camera but it took me a little while to really how I was supposed to play the game and move. The demo showed off Archery, Tennis, and Paintball. Archery was a lot of fun, and didn't require too much of a learning curve, but games like Paintball require players to make a few missteps before they can grasp the controls. One thing that I wasn't expecting was that my lazy movements that would have registered as a hard swat in WiiSports Tennis didn't cut it here. Freedom gets players active with fast swings and much more deliberate, forceful movements. Both of these titles hit store shelves this fall.

Next I moved onto the prettiest game at the Hudson booth: Lost in Shadow. Ever wonder what a Wii game would look like if it was made by Team Ico? Wonder no more! This atmospheric puzzler has players controlling the shadow of a boy longing to regain his body by climbing a colossal tower. Toying with player perspective, the game explores themes that place light against shadow and foreground against background in some really clever and often astonishing ways. The demo I played showed off some tutorial puzzles culminated in a strange chase sequence where my character was running away from this dark cloud of giant hands. Needless to say, it didn't take more than a few moments to hook me in and I'm already eagerly awaiting the game's fall release.

Finally, I paid a stop at the Bonk: Brink of Extinction station to meet up with an old friend. The Bonk games were always an acquired taste back in the day. They were cartoony and over the top, but the gameplay was strangely sophisticated for the time, allowing Bonk to perform more maneuvers than Sonic and Mario put together. It would be all too easy to throw even more abilities at the character for this XBLA/PSN release, but the team at Pi Studios has showed tremendous restraint by keeping the iconic character just the way fans remember him (perhaps, a lesson Sega could learn?). Brink of Extinction feels like a direct extension of series and perfectly realized. You've got bright visuals, big bosses, and over the top character animations and transformations that feel as though they've been ripped out of some lost Bonk entry and put into a 3D world. It's the same "Point A to Point B" platforming that I don't think see enough of today. The game doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it doesn't really need to when it's this much fun.