E3 2012: Kid-Friendly Games Are Just As Epic As The More Mature Titles
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The final part of NY1's week-long look at this year's big E3 video game convention in Los Angeles, shows it wasn't as easy as one might expect to find games aimed at children. NY1's Technology reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report. If you're not familiar with the current state of video games, it may seem odd to you that at a giant video game convention that fills the Los Angeles Convention Center, the majority of those games are not geared towards children. In fact, a person might be considered a bad parent for letting a child near most of the titles on display.
That doesn't mean family friendly titles are not on display. Disney, for one, certainly has its fair share. Its headliner, the sequel to last year's "Epic Mickey," is "Epic Mickey 2: The Power Of Two," which not only includes musical numbers this year but also, as its name implies, is multi-player.
"You're still going to play as Mickey but then if you have a second player who wants to jump in, the second player is going to be Oswald," says James Lewis of Junction Point Studios.
"Scribblenauts Unlimited" finally brings the hit game from handhelds to consoles. Just like its predecessors, where anything users can think of to write on the magic pad appears in the game, this version lets players use even more of their imaginations with their creations.
"We're now adding adjectives on the fly, so instead of just a 'dragon' you can now make a 'giant, purple, spotted, pregnant dragon,'" says Brittany Aubert of 5th Cell. "We also have an object editor so you can create any object from scratch, using anything from our dictionary."
Finally, the kiddie-friendly category includes a few new Lego titles that may cause children and their parents who grew up with this stuff to do battle to see who gets first crack at it.
In "Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes," players can play as some of the other DC superheroes, like Superman, Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern.
Another first for the world of Lego, "Lord Of The Rings," has many other firsts for a Lego title.
"For the first time, what we're really excited about is we're including the theatrical dialogue from the movie spoken by the mini-figures," says Nick Ricks of TT Games.
True "Lord Of The Rings" fans will be happy to know all three movies will not get broken down into three separate games, but instead be covered in one single title.