It was just a few hours into the day when the power suddenly went out and all eighty-nine screens, the largest collection of video game titles Microsoft Canada had ever brought together under one roof, went black. A car accident in the area had knocked down a hydro line, casting the Liberty Village section of Toronto into darkness and with it several rooms full of game designers, PC computers, Xbox 360 systems, and journalists.

The annual night club-styled event is designed to give members of the media, from newspaper columnists to television hosts, a chance to see all of the video games coming out for the upcoming holiday season, so that as we plot and plan our stories for November and December, we’ll hopefully devote air time and print space to all of the cool games that are bound to get lost in all of the Halo 3 coverage.

Not that Halo 3 wasn’t there, it was with demos both of the multiplayer version and a behind-closed-doors demo of the single-player version, but the event also included a wide variety of publishers from across the continent, from Quebec, Edmonton, Washington, California, and New York, and while all of the games were playing on Microsoft systems, many of the titles that were on display will also be released for other systems, including Guitar Hero III, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, Conan the Destroyer, Skate, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe to name a small few.

The interesting thing about the power failure was that most of the people in attendance stayed, even after it became clear that the power wasn’t going to come back on soon, or that in addition to the games and the lights, the air conditioning was also gone. Everyone was quite content to spend several hours in the dark, holding candles, sweating profusely, and chatting with designers about the very video games we couldn’t see.

It took five hours before a generator truck, hired at a moment’s notice by Microsoft, arrived and was hooked up to the building, and while the power did come back on, it was enough for about half of the games on display and not enough for the lights. Playing in the dark, here’s the game titles I did get a chance to see.

Rock Band

Similar to the insanely popular Guitar Hero series of games, Rock Band is a music-based game where you use plastic instruments to play along with popular rock songs. The twist is that it goes beyond the single guitar and offers all the parts for you to form an entire band including two guitars, a drum kit, and a microphone for vocals. By far the most popular display at the event (the crowd watching was so thick I couldn’t even get a decent photo of it), Rock Band’s instrument controllers both look and feel great. The drum kit comes with a real set of sticks and an impressive stool while the sensor pads that represent the drums look like they can take a great deal of abuse.

Almost identical to Guitar Hero’s design as a game, Rock Band involves an on-screen fret board where note icons scroll down to the bottom of the screen and players must push the buttons on their instruments to match. Play the notes successfully and the song is a success, play poorly and the song fails before you reach the end. Guitar players push fret buttons while strumming a “strum” button or moving a whammy bar. The drum kit works the same way, with players hitting each drum to match a note on the fret board and the foot pedal in time with a horizontal red bar that floats down the fret board. All of these parts, including the vocals (which publisher Electronics Arts did not have ready yet for demonstration) are efficiently placed onto a single television screen so that everyone can clearly see their notes.

What makes Rock Band a slam dunk purchase for me is that it will be online compatible at launch, meaning that if you buy a copy of the game but have no one to form a band with, you can connect online and locate other players to do just that. Just plug in your drums, for example, and connect online to find the individual people who have the guitars and microphone. Electronics Arts has yet to decide just how they plan to sell the game beyond the main package that contains everything. Whether you can buy the game and just one instrument remains to be seen, but with the online connection, you have the option to buy the main package and just hand out the instruments to your friends and then play together online during those nights when you can’t physically get together.

Rock Band’s price and release date have yet to be confirmed beyond “Holiday 2007”.

Lost Odyssey

Shown behind-closed-doors at X’07, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has created a mature, sophisticated and compelling role-playing adventure that has a surprisingly deep, literary feel to it. You feel as if you’re lost in an adult novel, one filled with evocative imagery and an almost historical sense of detail.

The story involves a race of immortals who decide to live amongst the humans by erasing the past one thousand years of their lives from their memories. This way they live alongside their human peers thinking they are equals and the two races can form valuable bonds and relationships. The problem is that, over time, many of the immortals begin to have flashbacks, little bits of memory from their past that soon haunt them and create a bit of an identity crisis. This sets them out onto a journey of discovery to find themselves and you manage a group made up of both immortals and humans, sorcerers and warriors, who set out to travel through magical worlds filled with monsters and characters of every shade of morality.

One impressive innovation is the use of the Gears of War “running camera” angle (Sakaguchi is a fan of the game I’m told) where the camera changes its depth of field for a focused view. In Lost Odyssey, this camera trick is used in dramatic scenes to single out character actions and expressions. This along with a masterful use of standard camera techniques makes the cinematic scenes play out with the same convincing quality as a network television show.

As a game it follows the same, familiar format of the Final Fantasy series, in that you control one character in third-person mode as you explore towns and talk to wandering characters, and then when a battle occurs, they all fold out for a turn-based exchange of charges, strikes, and magical effects. One criticism faced by this system in the past is that you can often fly through battles by simply button mashing, that they game tends to play itself. This time, when one of your party members moves to strike, you’ll see two concentric circles appear and slowly merge together. You’ll need to squeeze the trigger at exactly the moment they meet to have a successful hit.

Lost Odyssey is an exclusive title for the Xbox 360 and its due out this Holiday Season.

Halo 3

While Microsoft and Bungie are still keeping most of Halo 3’s secrets tucked close to their breast, my behind-closed-doors session with the single player mode of the game did offer up a few interesting nuggets about the upcoming blockbuster.

What they showed me was a level right out of Halo 2. It turns out that in Halo 3 you revisit one of your past battles from the second in the series. Yes it’s now in High Definition and yes I can see every individual blade of grass, but boy is it all just a little too familiar.

I watched as out hero Master Chief jumped aboard a TroopHog, a jeep transport jeep that can carry about five soldiers, and drove into a battle of covenant consisting of the usual grunts, lizard men, and the new Brutes who looks and act just a bit cooler than they did before.

In addition to the new TroopHog I saw a grunt dual wielding a pair of blasters, I saw the Master Chief deploy a wicked little portable shield from his pocket (it unfolds onto a little tripod and you can shoot through it), and witnessed the grunts deploy little turrets.

The Covenant Turrets are important as once you eliminate the creatures that are running them, you can rip the turret gun out of its tripod and use it as a portable Gatling-styled gun yourself. It slows you down considerably and has limited ammunition, but the animation sequence used to show Master Chief ripping that turret free is wonderfully macho and impressive.

I was shown another sequence in the game, thankfully one of the jungle levels where there was a different sense of landscape with all the undergrowth and stone buildings. Here Master Chief was joined by the Arbiter (the renegade Elite from Halo 2) and I was told that both characters would be playable in the game’s co-operative mode. So rather than have you and your friends both playing Master Chiefs, you can each take on a different role.

Finally I was shown a special video mode. This is similar to what was offered in the Halo 3 beta, except in the single player campaign you can choose to record an entire chapter. This means you can pause, rewind, or fast-forward through your entire game session. Better yet, when you pause the video playback, you can use your gamepad to wander through the level, like a character with the ability to pause time itself. This allows you to float about and see all the action that is going on off-screen. The Halo games feature massive battles and often there are things happening around you that you have no idea of. By being able to explore your gaming sessions, you can now see everything that is happening around you. In the sequence I watched, the camera was used to look inside the airborne transports to see what the soldiers were doing inside, to look through the under growth and watch the grunts run in different directions, we even spotted an interesting bug in the software as one sniper shot seemed to magically pass through a chopper and exit out the other side.

Halo 3 is an exclusive title to the Xbox 360 and will be released on September 25th.

Scene It?

The video game version of the popular interactive trivia game comes with a number of great improvements. The first is the use of wireless controllers. This little wands comes with one large buzzer button and a series of colour-coded answer buttons. Right away, this solves the whole Shout Out problem. With the traditional DVD game there are trivia modes where players must try to be the first one to shout out the answer. Deciding who actually is the winner is done using the honor system, meaning you and your friends have to decide, and of course that doesn’t always work. On the Xbox 360, those mode uses the electronic wands, so there’s no argument as to who was the first to buzz in.

The Xbox 360 version is also truly a video game incarnation, complete with 3D characters and environments that act out little scenes and sequences between the different trivia modes. Some modes have you buzzing in to answer a direct question, others have you trying to guess what is missing from a photoshopped picture, while others have you trying to guess the movie that goes with a drawing that is slowly revealed over time. This final mode is another example of the benefit a game system brings. Since the game is an actual piece of software running on a game system, it uses a number of animation effects and special sequences to give its trivia modes a bit of style. Looks like a fantastic family game. Its due out as an Xbox 360 exclusive this holiday season.

Mass Effect

As the power failure happened just as my session with Mass Effect began, I didn’t get to see the game so much as sit in the dark with a candle and talk about it. Which is not that hard as I have long been a fan of Calgary-base BioWare who are renown for being the masters of role-playing games. Their latest effort is an original science-fiction adventure, one that takes place about 200 years into the future. You play a character named Commander Sheppard who holds a position that is as much a diplomatic one as a military one as your main responsibility is to manage the relationships humanity holds with other alien life. Sheppard is a character that you yourself create and can be either a female or male character, with a customizable body and features that you can adjust to any configuration you want. Skin tones, ethnicity, whatever your heart desires, really.

The major shift for BioWare with Mass Effect is the idea of real-time combat. When a battle starts, you don’t have to wait for your turn, but rather can move and attack freely as you wish. Replacing the traditional idea of magic is an entire system of bionics and modifiable weapons. As you progress you’ll be able to upgrade your characters and take on classes or occupations that are specific to weapons use, technical ability, or bionics. In addition to finding or buying advanced weapons you’ll be able to upgrade your current set, but those upgrades can come with balances. You might make a rifle more powerful, but it will have the tendency to overheat, for example.

If you’ve ever played a BioWare game, then you’ll know that one of their strong points is in create games rich with sub plots, choices, and different paths that will change the game entirely each time you play. For Mass Effect they have structured it so that impatient players who want to just quickly whip through the game can do so easily and experience the main story, complete with rich cinematics, can do so, but for those who like to explore the little nooks and crannies and take in the virtual flowers, the game will bring forth a lot of charm and hidden secrets.

This includes separate storylines for male or female characters, with yes, romances as well as storylines that involve side characters that you pick up and travel with on your journey. Intergalactic travel will be a big part of the game, ranging from simply flying to a small asteroid and giving it a quick scan to landing on a planet and either exploring it on foot over in a vehicle such as the all-terrain “Mako”. The vehicles are needed as the worlds you visit will indeed be that large. If you take your time and take in everything the game offers, you can expect to play for around 60 hours total, which is a lot for the price of one game.

Other games I saw briefly before the lights went our that look really good included:Assassin’s CreedThe made-in Montreal game offers an action/adventure game involving an acrobatic assassin during the days of the Knights Templar. I’ve seen a few trailers and previews of this awesome game before and it’s already on my list of must-haves for 2007. It’s coming out on November 15th.

Conan

Based more on the original books than the movies, Conan is an action/adventure game that looks absolutely incredible. If you’re a fan of the graphic novels, the game has really capture the physical presence and look of Conan and the Hyborian world. Built around exploring dangerous environments and fighting powerful enemies, you must use a variety of combos and upgrade through a system of deadly weapons to chase down a mysterious force and an army of enemies that threaten the world. Lots of dual-wielding action and I’ve seen one poster for the game that shows a scantily clad woman lying at Conan’s feet, no word yet if that’s actually in the game. (not something I look for, but it is Conan).

LEGO Star Wars: Complete Saga

The first two games in this series are still among my all-time favorites and here with the complete Star Wars series of movies all gathered together in one full game, well the only other game to compete will be LEGO Indiana Jones.