Despite people coming in at a steady pace to play some action-packed shooters, my meeting with Codemasters consisted of two lower-key titles for Nintendo systems and, unfortunately, no assets.

The first title was Bella Sara, a game based off a fairly popular intellectual property targeted at younger girls. This acts as a mix of a fantasy game and Horsez, and it involves you collecting and caring for numerous horses; more specifically, you can collect and trade cards which unlock new horses for you, and you can obtain a total of five horses. Besides collecing the horses, you’ll need to groom them, feed them, and take them on rather short magical adventures to complete various tasks. This game, as far as I can tell, doesn’t seem to have a terrific amount of depth to it, compared to other DS offerings at E3, but what it does do seems to be done fairly well, and ideally it’ll capture its age demographic, which will be having more fun feeding their pink winged horses.

The other title was a Wii title entitied Dragonology, and instead of a horse sim targeted at young girls, it’s an dragon-focused action title for younger boys; basically, a villain is trying to capture all the dragons in the world, and, with the aid of some surprisingly well-voice-acted friends and a dragon, you need to save them all. As you would expect, the Wii Remote motion controls are used; you tilt the remote to tilt the direction your dragon is flying in, and certain gesture movements activate other dragon actions. I asked about the two interfering, and the rep told me that the dragon’s flight path would correct itself for any erroneous flight the gestures indicated. The game seems to be significantly deeper than Bella Sara in replayability, in that you can head back to previous stages with other dragons and check out other areas. At this stage in the game’s development, the graphics are not bad, the environments are very sparse, the music is good, and the voice acting is good; Codemasters seems on track to get this done properly by the holiday season, but I’m not sure if the package will be horribly deep when it’s done. We’ll have to see.

Two games to keep an eye on if you have young kids bugging you for cool, licensed video games come Christmas.