e for all

Smarty Pants Hands On Preview

EA games is really making a push into family entertainment on the Wii this holiday season. To put an emphasis on this, they spent their entire E3 press conference about family entertainment and family play titles like The Playground, Boogie and Smarty Pants, which was playable at E for All in anticipation of its November 19th release date. Smarty Pants is a trivia game that adds mini games to the standard question-answer format.

For anyone that has played You Don’t Know Jack or more recently, DVD games like Scene It, Smarty Pants takes that vibe and puts it on the Wii, but it is wrapped in a family friendly look. You use avatars that look awfully similar to the Mii’s that you create on the Wii. The game supports up to four players locally, but I have heard nothing about an online multiplayer feature as of yet.

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Medal of Honor Heroes 2 Comes to the Wii, Two Modes of Play and Multiplayer

EA has decided that while the Wii did not get a version of Medal of Honor: Airborne, it should not be left out of the Medal of Honor mediocraty tour. So Wii owners will get a new game from the franchise called Medal of Honor Heroes 2. It looks like the first game in the series was on the PSP only while this sequel will come to the Wii as well as the PSP. Electronic Arts brought the game to E for All and I decided to take a spin.

The game gives the player two ways to play the game. The first, shown in the above video, is the arcade mode. The arcade mode turns the game into more of a House of the Dead type shooter. You use the Wii Zapper to shoot at the enemies on the screen, by moving the targeting recticle onto a bad guy and pulling the trigger. If you need to reload, you tilt the gun, a la House of the Dead, or any of those arcade shooters where turning the gun away from the screen reloads. Damage is also exaggerated while playing in arcade mode.

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WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 on the Wii Video Footage

Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 is the newest entry in the Smackdown franchise from THQ. We were lucky enough to get a little bit of footage from the Nintendo booth of this new title in action. After shooting some of the footage, I decided to head over to the THQ booth where they had demo kiosks that had no crowds vs teh large lines at the Nintendo booth. Guess being at the entry door will make you the first place people go.

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HP Voodoo Rep Mark Gerberman Shows Off the Blackbird 002 PC

HP has never been known in the gaming community as the vendor to go to when you want to pump out insane framerates. It is a market that they tried to crack for years, including the Blackbird 001, which, was a decent effort, but fell short of what gamers wanted in a high powered gaming machine.

But HP is not known for giving up easy, so after looking for a partner to help them with their gaming PC venture, they decided to acquire boutique PC manufacturer Voodoo PC. Voodoo PC has always been known in the gaming community as a top notch shop that puts a lot of love and care into their PC products. From specialty folding of IDE cables, to unique air flow systems in their cases, you always got your money’s worth from Voodoo.

So what was to come from this merging of two distinctly different companies? The HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 PC. This machine was designed from the start to be a workhorse of a gaming machine, and to help HP gain a serious foothold in the highly lucrative boutique PC marketplace. Mark Gerberman gave us a tour of the Blackbird 002 and all I can say is that if they send me one of these for a preview, they might have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands to get it back.

Interview with Daniel Kayser from Gametrailers.com

GameTrailers.com has been on the rise in providing access to a plethora of game trailers, interviews, gameplay footage and other gaming related videos. The access they provide to the user allow you to find videos in many popular media formats. And the videos are also available for download in multiple formats, including Quicktime and Windows Media Video.

Daniel Kayser, Editorial Producer and Host of programming on Gametrailers.com, spent a few minutes with Aeropause and discussed what GameTrailers.com brings to the gaming community at large. He also took some time to talk about the Viacom purchase and what they hope to offer in the future. It will be interesting to see if the core product that Gametrailers.com brings will stay the same after the Viacom purchase.

Take a few moments to head over to GameTrailers.com and see what they have to offer you.

Rock Band Live at E for All

MTV and Electronic Arts pulled out all the stops at E for All and brought in a trailer stage to demo the soon to be released Rock Band. They had a main stage with two staging areas to practice before going on the main stage. The MTV partnership comes from the fact that they were taking video of anyone that went on the main stage for a new TV show that will focus on the Rock Band phenomenon. I found it amusing that this show will bring more music to MTV than it has shown all together in the last five years.

So I decided to get some video of one of the first performances that included one of the staff on the microphone. They were not bad, but it pointed out some good and bad about the game as a whole. And it still has me on the fence in regards to getting the game when it comes out.

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Super Mario Galaxy Video Footage from E for All

Super Mario Galaxy is another in a long line of Super Mario games over the years. No longer content with being in Super Mario World, Mario has set his sights on something bigger, the known Galaxy. This is a new Mario property from the genius mind of Shigeru Miyamoto that will take Mario gameplay to new and epic heights.

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Sam and Max Season Two Preview and Interview

Emily Morganti of Telltale Games, was nice enough to sit down and give us a presentation on the first episode of Sam and Max Season Two, Episode One, Ice Station Santa. The episode is suppose to warp those old school Christmas specials that we watched as kids long ago. Seems that Santa is making bad gifts and our favorite Freelance Police, Sam and Max have been called into duty to find out what is going on with Santa Claus. Seeing Santa packing heat was way funny and the gags are even better this time around.

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Have Master Chief Protect Your Data

Until today, I was not exactly sure what a Mimobot was. I know that I was asked by John Kopp to come over and look at the new Halo Mimobots, which are USB thumbdrives, with different designs. The first set is listed shown above and come in three different models. They have a Master Chief model followed up by a red and blue Spartan model. Mimoco has the exclusive rights to using the Master Chief and Spartan designs and plan to have several other models in the Halo series.

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Random Images from Day One at E for All

Well, the above image is from Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Nintendo Wii. I present these photos as an apology as I will not be able to get the video up from Day One until tomorrow evening. The video is all in order, but I forgot to get the base that allows me to download the video from the camera. But the video is worth it and has tons of great commentary from yours truly. Well its great unless you hate the sound of my voice. So click on the jump and check out some of the random images that we got from the show.

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