On Monday, EA Games hosted its own press conference here at E3 2009. Here are a few highlights from the event.

EA Sports announces Fight Night Round 4, for the first time allowing you to pit Ali against Tyson, with spectacular-looking results. Check out the big-screen demo:

EA Sports announces and demos Grand Slam Tennis for Wii, complete with a surprise appearance by tennis superstar Pete Sampras.

Brutal Legend designer Tim Schafer takes the stage to unveil several new characters and show off new video featuring star Jack Black. Note: this video is NSFW.

A full level demo for Pandemic’s The Saboteur, which features creative use of color and black & white, and finds you working with the resistance in Nazi-occupied France during WWII.

Last but by far not least, a progress report on the highly-anticipated MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, featuring on-stage Jedi and the world premiere of the game’s cinematic trailer. (If only the prequel trilogy had been more like what the trailer shows!)

Post from: EveryJoe

E3 ‘09: EA press conference highlights

Those lovely people over at The International House of Mojo have yet again accomplished the seemingly impossible: they’ve written the next edition of what they like to call LucasArts’ Secret History! Doesn’t the name by itself sound wonderfully mysterious? As though the earth would have shattered had they not written another secret history?!

In this edition of LucasArts’ Secret History (part VIII), we get to learn all the nitty gritty details of one of my favorite LucasArts games, Day of the Tentacle, in which a purple tentacle tries to take over the world.

What? A PURPLE TENTACLE COULD take over the world. It could happen, damnit!

And here, you were probably thinking that my favorite game from LucasArts would be their new game Fracture. Well, you would be wrong! While I am proud that LucasArts has finally stepped away from their StarWars obsession, I’m still saddened that it is not an adventure game. AND IT SHOULD BE.

Anyways, back to the tast on hand. Secret History VIII. Learning about Day of the Tentacle. Yadda yadda yadda. In the article, we learn of some pretty interesting facts about the game. Like, Maniac Mansion, the prequel to Day of the Tentacle (DotT) was suppose to be like a horror movie you get to play (which is hard to believe, because that shiz was funny). When Tim Schafer (DoubleFine) and Dave Grossman (TellTale) began production on DotT, they wanted to make the game feel like a Saturday morning cartoon. From the article:

If Maniac Mansion is like playing through a cheesy horror movie, Day of the Tentacle is like playing through a Saturday morning cartoon, and everything from the brand of humor to the puzzle design reflects this.

Speaking of Saturday morning cartoons: What happened to all of them? I remember waking up on a Saturday morning, turning on the tv to any local station and BLAM. There were cartoons everywhere! Now, you turn on the tv to a local station on Saturday, there is just boring old news on. Isn’t that a bunch of crap?

My favorite part of the article is the section entitled Trivia! Secrets! Sex! (Not sex). The title seems misleading, as there isn’t any mention of “sex” in this part of the article. But if you look closely at the parenthesis in the title, you’ll also notice it says “not sex”. Which means, there really isn’t sex in the article. They just like to say the word sex. And what person with a 12 year old’s brain doesn’t? I mean, I’ve probably said sex at least sex… erm six times in this article. And it gets funnier every time I say it! I like learning trivia about games and I also like secrets. This is the meat and potatoes of the article, in my book.

[Image courtesy of Amazon.]

Post from: EveryJoe

LucasArts’ Secret History VIII