E3 2012 Day 2 - Wii Love Celebrities and Dancing

Day 2 was kind of short for me since I got a late start, but it was still filled with notable experiences.

First up, the celebrities. Adam West of Batman fame was there. He was promoting Family Guy Online. I didn't know this, but he plays himself on that cartoon series as the mayor:

I also got to see James Mardsen. He is probably best known for playing Cyclops on the X-Men movie trilogy. He was also in the movie Enchanted playing Prince Edward:

(Of course, I had to point out that even in E3, sometimes they can't spell ... I mean, come on, "Singning"?)

Next up, Nintendo, which has an awesome exhibit with lots of stations where you can play Wii and Wii U games:

Just a word about the Wii U. It's Nintendo's next generation game console. The most striking feature is their controller, which is actually a tablet with a full display. They have a lot of ideas that they will implement using the new controller, but I'll highlight one idea that is less related to gaming and more related to making people go "gee whiz":

Wii U Panorama View

In a nutshell, you can use the tablet controller to aim a camera in any direction you want: left, right, behind, up, down. It's hard to describe with words or even with pictures, but there should be videos up on the web. But since all I have are words and photos, here I go.

The demo they had was of a moving tour through one of four different locations. I chose Kyoto because I once visited that beautiful city, but the demo will have me go through the city when the cherry blossom trees are blooming. Once the demo started, I found my virtual presence on a cart being pulled by a man down a street in Kyoto. Next to me on the cart was a geisha, whom I can see by rotating my body and holding the controller to the right of me. To the left of me were houses, to the right was a canal, and all around me were cherry blossoms. Hopefully these pictures convey the general idea:

Now I can see how Nintendo could use this idea in some of their game franchises. For example, you could be a gunner in some tank game where you rotate the turret you're in using the controller. Or you could recreate the scene from Star Wars Episode IV where Luke and Han are blasting away at Tie Fighters in the Millenium Falcon:

But really, I think just the full panoramic tour through different tourist attractions is enough to make house guests go "Oooooooh ... Ahhhhhh ..."

Like I said, it was a short day, so I couldn't visit much more, but just a few words on the Microsoft XBox exhibit, where their biggest draw of course was Halo:

I didn't have time to go into the Halo demo booth, of course, but I did have some time to try out the upcoming Kinect game Dance Central 3. No photos yet, but my friend did take a video of me playing the game. I'll post that as soon as it's online.

OK I have to run off to Day 3. Stay tuned!