As discussed in this week's ShackCast, I attended an E3 presentation for the Mistwalker-designed, I.T. Planning-developed RPG Lost Odyssey, which is headed to Xbox 360 later this year. I had been pretty excited about the game beforehand, but following my time with it, I couldn't help but note that the latest effort from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi felt a little familiar.

Lost Odyssey stars Kaim, an immortal who has lived for over 1000 years, and in true RPG fashion, can't remember any of it. As the game progresses, he'll recall more and more of his past exploits while dreaming. These repressed memories are presented in the form of short stories penned by Japanese novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu, and once unlocked are available to read at any time under the "A Thousand Years of Dreams" menu option.

Capcom's Phoenix Wright is back for a third round of lawyering on Nintendo DS, and Carlos Bergfeld took a hands-on session with the game to deliver his early verdict on Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations.

I played a good portion of the game's first episode, Turnabout Memories, which enlists players as a young Mia Fey, Phoenix Wright's mentor from the other titles. In a stunning portrayal of turnaboutery, it appears the young Wright has committed murder over a squabble involving his girlfriend's ex. Despite being one of the most text-heavy series on any console, Trials and Tribulations flaunts its writers' finesse by maintaining fervent interest throughout the court proceedings.

Rayman Raving Rabbids is returning on Wii and DS for more mini-game madness, and the game has more of a multiplayer focus this time around. Following up on our previous coverage, Carlos Bergfeld got some some hands-on time with both incarnations of Ubisoft's upcoming sequel.

I had the most fun with what an Ubisoft rep described as the Rabbids' interpretation of American football. It was essentially what young children innocently refer to as "smear the queer," with one football-toting Rabbid trying to keep the ball from the others. The Nunchuk's analog stick controlled a Rabbid's running, and shaking the Wii remote made the characters dive viciously at the ball-bearing bunny.

As our E3 content winds down, we've got a brief updated look at Capcom's upcoming light-gun esque zombie shooter, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. With a Wii Zapper peripheral available for use at the demo station, Carlos Bergfeld tried the game both with and without the device to find out which one let him down zombies faster.

I played the level both with the Zapper and without, and came away with mixed feelings. Using it certainly added the feeling of rocking an arcade shooter, but aiming wasn't as accurate as with the Wii-mote alone. I did get better by the end of the level, but it still felt like I was more of a marksman playing sans Zapper.

I had the chance to take a look at Sony Online's action-based MMO The Agency last week, but I didn't really learn anything new. I sure had a hell of a time getting in the door, though. Follow me on a harrowing tale of dangerous doormen, secret data tapes, and potato salad. Sneak a peek.

An unassuming developer ambles by, and I pull him into a choke-hold before he can trigger the alarm. His eyes widen in shock as I turn my chiseled arm into a vice, properly constricting his voice before the interrogation to come. "If you want to live, tell me what your PVP plans are," I growl harshly into his ear, dragging him back into the shadows of a food cart. Read more...

This open-ended title from THQ and developer Blue Tongue will be compared to Katamari Damacy in every preview and review you read--except this one. Instead, I get to the squishy core of the Blob, and evaluate whether painting an entire town all on your own is as fun as it sounds. Color your opinion.

Ultimately, there really is no finish line in de Blob. You move on to new areas, and you gain more points, and you get fatter. It's hard to imagine being intensely motivated to move from level to level, although the simplistic story and gameplay aren't engrossing to the point of necessitating a satisfying reward. A THQ representative likened de Blob to the act of popping bubblewrap, and I would agree. Like bubblewrap, de Blob is a mindless, yet oddly satisfying distraction at heart.

Super Mario Galaxy promises to be one of the first truly platforming-focused platformers of this console generation, and Nintendo toted it out to a second E3 to demonstrate some more levels. The company is being conservative with how much of the game it is willing to show at this point, but we tried out what was available, and it's looking great.

What is much more exciting about Super Mario Galaxy, and the aspect of the game I expect to fulfill the promise of the next worthy game in the core Mario series, is its promise of a return to actual platforming. While 2D platformers have had something of a renaissance lately, largely due to the Nintendo DS and PSP, their 3D cousins have been in a sad decline over the last generation or so. They seem to be devolving mainly into third-person action games with jumping thrown in, rather than actual platformers in which engaging physical traversal of the world itself is the crux of the gameplay.

When it releases this October, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass will be the second Zelda in two years--but, fortunately, its mechanics don't seem rushed. The touch screen control actually works, and I got to try it out firsthand at E3. Explore my impressions.

Most notable is the new map, which can be pulled down from the top screen to the bottom screen with the press of a button, and which can actually be drawn upon with the stylus--hallelujah! This is the kind of so-obvious-in-hindsight design decision that feels like it should be implemented in every exploration-based adventure or platformer on the system.

When 2K Games announced that Sid Meier's addictive strategy series was heading for consoles and "upping the action," fans weren't sure what that would entail--but as the first true Sid Meier-led Civ game since Civ II, it's probably in good hands. We got a look at Civilization Revolution (PS3, X360, Wii, DS) during last week's E3 to give you an idea of what to expect. Chris Faylor reports.

With Wii and DS versions also underway, the representative assured me that gameplay will be basically the same across the various platforms. "The way [Sid Meier] wrote the code, the game core actually doesn't know what system it's on," he noted. "It's the presentation layer that gets wrapped around the core that knows, so they will be able to play very similar."

Queasy Games' Everyday Shooter will surely garner praises from high society types, lauding its qualities as a piece of interactive art. They'll be right, but all you really need to know is the game is damn fun, as I found out firsthand at this year's E3 from Queasy Games' creator/composer/producer/sole employee Jonathan Mak. Look at all the pretties.

Inspired by the musical interlacement in games like Rez and Lumines from Tetsuya Mizuguchi as well as PARSEC47 from Kenta Cho, Everyday Shooter adds a freightload of flair to the now commonplace dual-joystick shooter formula. The combination of stunningly stylized visuals and musical melodies based on in-game performance brought me to a trance-like state of audio-visual euphoria.

Even when you're a huge sissy, sometimes the job has to get done. Chris Faylor peeks out from under the covers to sample Condemned 2: Bloodshot (PS3, X360), the sequel to Monolith's brutal action title. Take a look, if you dare!

Opting for a 2-on-1 drunken brawl in an alleyway filled with bottles of booze, producer Constantine Hantzopoulos soon faces two stumbling hobos, one of whom throws a prosthetic arm at him. He intercepts the object and sends it shooting back with a well-timed button press, knocking his opponent to the ground. As for the other hobo, Hantzopoulos grabs a nearby bottle of booze and throws it at the fellow, soaking him in flammable liquid, before pulling out a taser and setting him ablaze. Read more...

Did you get that...thing we sent you? It's a first look at High Voltage Software's Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for PlayStation 2 and PSP. A Capcom-published courtroom comedy with gameplay styled after Capcom's own Phoenix Wright series and cameos from Capcom video game characters, Birdman seems to be hitting the right notes. Carlos Bergfeld investigates.

Even this case had a Capcom cameo--Street Fighter 2's red-blooded all-American, Guile. Birdman demonstrates what he believes to be a fake lighter by setting Guile's hair ablaze. Ever the badass, Guile, with a fawning female in tow, allows his hair to burn. No time for pain when you've got M. Bison to deal with.

As one of the games Microsoft is hoping to use to snare casual gamers, an audience not always associated with the Xbox line, Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action isn't as exciting as many of the games showcased during E3 2007, but our own Chris Faylor had a blast when he checked it out firsthand. Read his impressions of WXP's Xbox 360 port of Screenlife Games' movie trivia game.

As a dark and stormy sky came into view, I once again fell prey to my gut instinct, buzzing in and choosing Twister. This was the wrong answer. Immediately afterwards, a distinctive clock tower and a familiar white-haired scientists appeared, indicating the proper choice was, of course, Back to the Future.

Hardly anything has been shown from Ensemble Studios' Xbox 360-exclusive real-time strategy game Halo Wars, but as it turns out the game has been in development for over two years--with the first six months just spent on refining control. Chris Faylor grabbed a first look of the game during E3 to get a handle on how Bungie's Halo universe is translating over to the RTS realm.

The ideals and quirks of Halo permeate every aspect of the game, from the rotating circular objects in the blue-heavy menus to the familiar sounds of the distinctive Halo weaponry and alien battle cries. In the opening cinematic of the demonstration, which showcased an impressively detailed ship hovering near over a lush horizon, even the camera angles and movements were reminiscent of those in Bungie's work.

During E3, I attended a closed-doors presentation of BioWare's epic Xbox 360 space RPG Mass Effect, as demonstrated by company president Greg Zeschuk and project director Casey Hudson. The pair showed off a particularly affecting scene involving an understandably frustrated party member, and gave a sense of the vast scale of the game's world. Check it out..

All in all, Mass Effect is a gorgeous game, with clearly a great deal of effort expended on both its locales and its characters. The level of detail extends far and wide: during a trip to a planet from which a static-obscured distress call had been sent, the team dropped a six-wheeled transport vehicle into shallow water on the surface, and after zooming in it was possible to see droplets of water cascading off the vehicle's armor.

Ubisoft's Nate Mordo gave us the rundown on Free Radical Design's newest console shooter, Haze. A PlayStation 3 exclusive for the holidays at least, the game pits players in an epic struggle of technology versus nature, or man versus performance-drug-enhanced man. Hopefully, the multiplayer will be reasonably radical as well. Take a clear look.

Making use of a drug called Nectar, Mantel soldiers have several abilities to afford them advantages against unlucky uprisers, in addition to mentally blocking the horrors of war. An ability called Nectar Perception highlights enemy bodies among the dense forest for easy targeting, and Nectar Focus takes this one step further by offering headshot-enabling superaim. Nectar Foresight creates a nice looking ripple effect to warn of incoming danger like grenades, and Melee Blast powers soldiers up for close range rebel-ramming smashes.

Chris Faylor attended Activision's pre-E3 event, and met with Guitar Hero publisher RedOctane at E3. From his experiences he has assembled a Frankenstein's monster of a Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock preview, providing plenty of detail about Neversoft's first foray into the series and containing plenty of expletive-laden quotes from the involved parties. Read and/or rock on.

One of the first things Dodge did was hand me the new Xbox 360 wireless guitar, which has been modeled after the Gibson Les Paul. I'd been looking to get my hands on the wireless guitar ever since that earlier event, when Neversoft president and co-founder Joel Jewett had ruthlessly smashed one of the wired Xbox 360 guitars into the ground until it was nothing but a shamble of broken wires, plastic and circuitry. "One thing though that fucks me off, is the fucking cord," he said at the time.

Following THQ's announcement of Darksiders: Wrath of War (PS3, X360) at E3 last week, I had a chance to go hands-on with the game, which is currently aiming for a 2008 release. And although the Darksiders team at Vigil Games may have an artistically-experienced leader in Joe Madureira, I was unenthused with both the look and gameplay of this early build. Share in my apathy.

While the lead character in Darksiders--one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War--certainly looks different in a superficial comic book sense, the gameplay doesn't differ much from the wild combo-stringing attacks of God of War's Kratos. Using a giant sword as his weapon of choice, War trots through the standard post-apocalyptic landscape, cutting down the standard monsters and demons on his mission of standard revenge. Continue reading...

NCsoft's new CryENGINE-powered MMO probably doesn't innovate enough to interest anyone not already endeared to massively multiplayer gameplay. For those into that kind of thing, however, it's looking to be a piece of cake--familiar enough to immediately pick up, and sugary sweet in every sense. Check it out.

As is often the case with certain games, none of the screenshots have accurately captured what Aion looks like in motion. One civilization's capital city hovered in the air like an uprooted potato, whisps of cloud encircling its exposed roots and furling around the edges of the rocky mass. There wasn't much bloom at work, and yet every tree and mountainside popped with an aural permeance, leaving a room of jaded journalists looking pleasantly surprised. Read more...

The onslaught of E3 coverage continues here at Shacknews with Carlos Bergfeld's thoughts on Naughty Dog's first PlayStation 3 title, the exploration-heavy Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The visuals are certainly impressive, but does the gameplay match up? Read on to find out.

We've already reported on all the crazy blend shaders, facial mapping and procedural animation layering--needless to say, this game looks damned good. Sam Thompson, line producer at SCEA, demoed a new build of the game for me at E3, slipping in details like the target of 7,000 animations for the game's hero, up from the 3,000 of the build shown.
Keep on reading...