thq-logoMyself (Quatters) and Maxi were fortunate enough to be invited to the THQ Post E3 game preview night which gave us a good chance to play some unreleased games announced at E3 and have a chat with a few THQ guys. The first game we got our hands on was Marvel Super Hero Squad for Wii.

Essentially, there’s two parts to the game. The first is the story mode, where you follow one Marvel character’s story, with a friend joining in too. The game does seem to have rather simplistic controls, but is a lot of fun. It reminded me personally of the recent Lego games.

The other mode is free-for-all battle, meaning anyone who loves Smash Bros. would almost definitely have fun with this too. Rather than being based on a 2D fighting arena, it’s now in full 3D, so there’s a lot of running around and dodging. Also, you don’t have to knock enemies off the arena, (everyone has a health bar) but knocking them off does provide an easy win. On top of that, there’s lots of items floating around and each character feels quite different to play with. All your favourite characters are there too: Spiderman, Wolverine, The Hulk and even some rarer characters like Thor.

The next game we had a look at was also aimed at a more casual market, World of Zoo. Essentially it’s a much deeper version of Nintendogs. You have a whole Zoo to play with and each animal reacts differently to their environments as well as various stimuli. They’re very cutesy and active, and it’s the sort of game that could even give the more hardcore gamers some guilty pleasure, much like Animal Crossing has over the years.

The final Nintendo game we got to play was Capcom vs. Tatsunoko. Continuing a now long running tradition of fighting games with lots of guest stars, this game is the latest, and some would say greatest of the series. Being Tatsunoko characters rather than characters who are more familiar to Western audiences means people would probably be playing with a few different characters starting out to find their favourites, rather than just go for the old classics, which definitely makes it a refreshing fighting game.

Overall it was a fun night. We were also actually hoping to try Monster Hunter Tri but unfortunately it still hasn’t been confirmed for a Western release so Capcom weren’t ready to let THQ lay it out for us. We’ll be eagerly keeping an eye out for it in the future though!

Thanks to all the guys at THQ for hosting the night, we had a great time. A special thanks also to Paul Houlihan for inviting us to attend.