E3 2018 - Sony

Cocaine beard has seemingly created his own Santa's Grotto for Playstation's audience this E3. He spouts the standard platitudes inside their "church tent" before introducing a similarly low key mellow banjo player. Did Sony lose half the company gambling or something?

Nobody hold your lighters up, you'll burn the place down.

I retain my stance from Bethesda's review that non-game music always kind of misses the mark at these events. Thankfully this banjo guy segues into the soundtrack and footage of The Last Of Us: Part Two with Ellie at some kind of post-apocalypse prom dance with her girlfriend. This transitions very brutally into a gameplay demo that, as expected sees Ellie taking the lead role and much of Joel's functionality.

Stealth, gunplay and melee gameplay all seems intact as does the viciously vacant morality of the people of TLoU's world. Not much is different aside from some new stealth and dodging manoeuvres and an overall smoothness that is suspiciously impressive. If the demo was doctored in any way i certainly didn't spot it but perhaps we're just at that blurred line of cutscene and gameplay now.

Unfortunately this strong start crumbles into a shoe salesman telling us that the crowd "is currently moving on to the next part of the experience." which makes Sony's E3 sound like a theme park or one of those haunted trails where minimum wage graduates in face paint scream at you in the dark for an hour...I'm sure it's not that though #livingwage.

Shoeman and Clementine interview Shawn Layden behind what looks like a hastily assembled worktop tucked into the corner of a room somewhere. Shawn talks about letting developers reach their creative vision unimpeded which is great and all but this looks like the shit I usually skip before and at the end of the conference. Is this the first time an E3 conference has had a broadcast intermission?

Continuing with what I hesitate to even call a trailer so much as an advert ripped straight from Facebook we're shown a moving bullet in the hope it keeps our interest/arousal piqued. "Preorder CODBLOPS4 and get 4 REMASTERED CODBLOPS2 and CODBLOPS1 MAPS TO USE IN CODBLOPS3 BY WAY OF CODBLOPS9 TWINNED WITH HAUBOURDIN IN ASSOCIATION WITH PEPSI AND CODBLOPSCROPTOPS IN SHOPS NOPS...CODBLOPSPHWOAR! COMING SOON" Sadly not even the ghost of Billy Mays could convince me to care about this and it's now painfully obvious they're just stalling for time.

Soggy shoes and clementmind desperately drag some other randomers to their panel to chat shit before barricading themselves with some bewilderingly brief trailers which they themselves admit most people have apparently already seen.

Ping-ponging back and forth, the panel flounder and flail trying to fill for time. It seems even the pretence of not talking pure shite falls away into filling dead air with "we're almost ready. We're so almost ready, only a few mere seconds away at most surely before we return to the main E3 showcase just as soon as we go to see that which is very soon so stay tuned as we nearly head over to where it's almost time for more things of actual substance and importance."

The only thing more annoying than the pungent awkward video-game-less atmosphere there was realising here with a final sixth trigger pull that I forgot to load the gun before starting E3 Russian Roulette.

Guess I'll have to settle for cringing myself into lockjaw.

Evidently the barn location was just for TLoU and not worth the set up frankly. Now we find ourselves in a domed, more traditionally E3-looking place with a lone man in traditional Japanese robes playing a wind instrument on stage. I am sensing a pattern and it's a potentially drawn out and painful one as our musician repeatedly struggles with his instrument.

Finally this leads into Ghost of Tsushima, a game I knew nothing about until just now. Shawn laden with cocaiden however claims the conference is focusing more on a few games in depth rather than "big surprises" which is actually very welcome after writing the words "CG trailer" so many times this year it might as well be my signature.

Ghost appears to be an action game set in the midst of a Mongolian invasion of Japan. The gameplay seems unremarkable but certainly not bad and graphically it seems better looking than the actual setting it was based off probably did.

Thankfully without needing another musical introduction, a trailer for Control plays. A surreal third person shooter where your character can seemingly be subjected to MC-Escher level design at any moment. A handgun, powers of flight and telekinesis look like your primary skills against malformed human creatures but the actual plot is unclear at this point. I'm always down for trippy mind-bending aesthetics but the best games incorporate them into the gameplay too so worth keeping a cautiously optimistic eye on this one.

Speaking of the best games, after so long a trailer finally reveals the Resident Evil 2 remake. Not a lot of gameplay shown but just confirmation it still exists is a relief. A January 2019 release and answering the burning question of camera style, it has ultimately opted for the RE4 over-the-shoulder type. Otherwise it appears to nail the atmosphere and hit all the right beats of the original...Apart from the inclusion of better voice acting though which is a relief/shame (delete as appropriate)

Swinging all the way to the other end of the tonal scale comes a goofy sci-fi platformer called Trover Saves The Universe. It doesn't look like much right now but with the creators of Rick and Morty behind production it could be at least be an amusing affair.

Kingdom Hearts 3 continues to be the most confusing nonsensical shit I've seen since Death Stranding which then proceeds to upstage it by a degree of Whattheactualhelltillion and five. The trailer seems to show a lot of gameplay and yet I still can't say for sure what is happening.

Norman Feetus is some kind of hellscape Fed-Ex delivery man who has to traverse mountains and ravines, whilst also avoiding the semi invisible black tar ghost monsters. There is a lady with spiky shoulders who mentions something called "Timefall" and seems like an ally but in her spare time eats fleshy bug things so...yeah...That's about the best I can do to describe the now seemingly unfiltered madness of Kojima's mind.

To balance out the confusing weirdness, here is a tame shot of a lady with a Sci-Fi umbrella...Unless it's just broken.
Agh fuck! Even this just poses more questions!

Far more knowable and less challenging, at least to us but perhaps not FromSoft and their lawyers. Nioh 2 continues the Japan Souls experience, right off the back of FromSoft announcing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice at Microsoft's event. I can't say much about Nioh 2 unfortunately because my nemesis the brain-dead vision-mixer returns to implement that infuriating pointless fuckery of zooming out of the screen to show the motionless audience silently watching the screen.

Last but not least comes the Spiderman game (Is it really just called Spiderman?). The writing seems on point, the passable if now slightly overdone Arkham style combat is coupled with what looks like smooth and fun web swinging. Forever the biggest mystery and seemingly the hardest yet most essential thing for these games to get right. Lots of classic and some lesser known villains get involved and overall it's a very promising look at the game.

This weirdly structured conference kind of comes to an end with the typical summary montage but then shoeman and satsuma return to show a cryptic CG teaser of a Fromsoft VR title about fairies. Following this we see a lot more of Spiderman in its open world environment followed by an explanation of what the weird creature interludes were in between all the major game segments this conference.

Turns out they were manifestations from the seemingly limitless creation game Dreams that was hinted with an intriguing yet sceptically ambitious trailer last year. We get a brief look at some gameplay and the devs are keen to emphasise the simplicity with which you and friends can use the tools.

If you have dreams about pink trees it means you were a flamingo in a past life.

This seems like one you'll need to try yourself to really know the limits and details of what's possible and whether it satisfies what you personally want to create. These types of games aren't for everyone but myself, I'm pleased to see it at least still exists and a beta is approaching later in the year.

I don't know if I'm covering post-show content now or when this thing officially ended but all else that happened was more of the panel chatterblabbing, schedules and time-lapses of Shawn's lesbian barn so I think it's safe to call it a day there. An odd, different, patience-testing and quite clumsy conference from Sony but they did show more actual raw gameplay footage than the others and most of it was of a very high quality. Perhaps next year just do that without all the musical chairs and indeed musical non-chairs.

E3 2018 - Ubisoft

Soulless corporate stooges and transparent fake pally businessmen step aside, the masters of cringe are here. Within seconds I'm looking at a dancing tool in a panda ringleader costume relegated to an alleyway but sadly not a dumpster. More preening pantomime humiliations convulse all over the place and I try to escape early to be met with another empty chamber. After being absorbed into one dancer's stomach we finally reach a stage but not an end to the costumed carnival of cheese.

I get that this is Just Dance's shtick but by Christ I cringed the skin on my face inside out. They didn't even show the fucking game either.

Was really hoping one of these chucklefucks would get devoured by a street-sweeper.

A CG trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2 shows...honestly I don't even know. I didn't play the first but was it always full of awfully voiced, horrific looking animal people? I thought it was about taking photos.

A producer and narrative designer arrive on stage to show 20 seconds of footage alongside a lot of rambling about the seedy sci-fi world they've created. Then suddenly Joseph Gordon Levitt bum rushes the stage and explains his new company HitRecord and the slightly unclear way it allows the community to be a part of creating the game, which sounds...convenient for Ubisoft.

The giddy devs then exit the stage and while they think they "nailed it" the person in charge of their microphones clearly didn't.

A new bloke appears to praise Rainbow Six Siege before introducing Another Mindset. Unfortunately not a literal mindset that could perhaps convince Ubi to have less circus shit at their conferences, but what I think is an emotional documentary about pro-gamers of Rainbow Six Siege. Was anyone asking for that? Will that footage not essentially be a Let's Play with occasional live action scenes going to get more Relentless from the corner shop?

The onesie gimp duo from last year apparently got divorced and only one of them got custody of the tiny dirt bike.  Arriving very slowly in an Evel Knievel get up before climbing on stage and eating shit face first into a collapsible podium. Credit where it's due, the drawn out aftermath with stagehands sweeping up the wreckage got a smirk from me.

Somehow less embarrassing than most of EA's conference.

The chunky funnyman gets another less ridiculous but still self-admitted fatman to introduce Trials: Rising which looks the same as the last game except apparently they got Youtubers involved in the development. The closing trailer does at least seem aware that a large part of the appeal of these games is crashing rather than completing the courses.

This E3 seems weirdly denim themed as a melodramatic dev caught between dressing down in jogging bottoms and trying to invent a denim corset comes on stage to talk about the Division 2.

A lengthy CG trailer tells us nothing I didn't already know even when I've actively tried to avoid watching anything related to this game out of sheer boredom. Mr Lacking a Wardrobe Division returns to introduce unique weapons like an explosive crossbow and a grenade launcher which surely are practically the same thing.

Those are the names of the three clothing brands he mashed together.

They also have three DLC's planned but they're free so that gets an applause. From the crowd I mean not me. I was distracted by how much of his speech started sounding like political commentary.

Maybe that's the appeal of these games? Abe Lincoln quotes and talk of "History's defining moment." makes the generic third person squad shooter seem deeper than it actually is. They even use music from a band (admittedly one I'm a fan of) that blends Chain-gang black slave songs with satanist heavy metal in the needless second CG trailer so I guess political controversy is just their marketing angle.

"Shut up and plant the C4." - Abe's Squadmate

Crew members attempt to inconspicuously move an orchestra on stage whereupon a live musical performance accompanies the next trailer. Mario Rabbids Kingdom Battle Donkey Kong Adventure is a fucking stumbling homunculus of a name even if it is just DLC but from what I hear about the prior game it will probably be at least half good.

People continue to mutter obscenities and racial slurs into their accidentally audible microphones before a CG trailer plays for the pirate ship sections of Assassin's Creed 4. Now shrewdly made into a full game called Skull and Bones.

A man with time to grab a scarf but not to do up his blazer explains more of the game before edited footage somewhere between a demo and a trailer shows gameplay at last. It is still blatantly the torso of AC4 but there appears to be enough new depth and tactics to justify its existence and it still looks fun after the remodelling.

Continuing the celeb train Elijah Wood and game director Benoit Richer introduce Transference. A cinematic semi-live action psychological thriller intended for VR but thankfully not exclusive to it.

Star Fox has been demoted to some toy tie-in spaceship shooter called Starlink. That said, it appears functionally more interesting than Star Fox Zero did. To ram the point home they bring a slightly befuddled Miyamoto into the audience to give his implied blessing before handing him a model Arwing and taking him "backstage".

"Mate I've already got like a hundred of these."

Unable to afford their Viking Commander anymore For Honor's less intimidating creative director insists the game works a lot better now and offers to give it away free for anyone who can traverse Uplay on PC. On top of this they're adding a new China faction and a castle siege multiplayer mode which I would have assumed was already in the game given its prominence in all the demos and trailers.

The Crew 2 is a racing game and between the lady introducing its' thick accent and being centimetres from eating her microphone I'm not sure anyone understood a word she said about the game. Thankfully I care only slightly less than this conference's sound engineers.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is Assassin's Creed Obviously going to be shown since it was already leaked. Some irritatingly intermittent footage eventually gives way to a pretty undoctored seeming gameplay demo featuring RPG elements from Origins, all out war more than assassinations and as you'd expect a fantastic, authentic looking Greek environment.

The only game that lets you lie to Socrates' face.

Yves then brings everyone on stage to clap themselves or the audience or video games in general. It was very unclear but there was a lot of clapping and smiling going on. So as expected Ubisoft started horrific but unexpectedly at least nursed the wound into a peaceful death. It still doesn't redeem the nightmare-inducing panto shit they keep doing though.

I get that drama students need money but there has to be a better way.

E3 2018 - Bethesda

I almost didn't write a review for Bethesda this year since I thought "They'll probably do fine without much to mock or laugh at." Turns out I was both right and wrong which is the worst kind of wrong. Starting with such a saccharine "Look we're human trailer" it almost felt like parody with "This is Bethesda" actually being typed out and put on screen, while "Generic Inspirational Beats #4" and "Smiley Twee Tunes #11" played in the background. Bethany Esda goes on at length about how gosh darn diverse, friendly and fun Bethesda is to work for. You're not EA, you don't need to defend that. Doing so without provocation just makes you look weird at best and guilty preachy at worst.

Unless you're baking a watermelon-based video game I don't care.

Pete Hinemind walks out and flashes the cameraman before continuing the intro video's ride that nobody asked to be on. Yammering about how great their company is, the now obligatory and thus meaningless thanking of the fans and shitting on Walmart.

After promising a look at Rage 2 what we get instead is a live performance from Andrew WK a man connected to the game in so much as he said the title a few times. Unless someone performs a blood magic ritual and resurrects David Bowie or someone of his caliber, I don't think non-game music is ever going to work at these events. Even the cameras couldn't find enough people smiling to give the illusion of excitement.

When that finally ends instead of that look at Rage 2 we get the game's directors talking bollocks and doing a painful David and Goliath comedy act (or possibly an ad for Rogaine) Tiny Tim tells us "I know that you are here to see the game" Which must mean this pointless pre-amble is specifically included just to waste everybody's time.

The eventual gameplay demo features Mad Max aesthetics and Doom style FPS action which seems solid albeit very scripted in this instance. The protagonist acquires what I can only describe as a poorly chosen upgrade to show in this demo as "Shatter" is a dishonestly named, fairly limp Jedi force push and the protagonist seems like the only one impressed by it.

Next in eyeball range is a community manager for Elder Scrolls Legends. A card game video game that has apparently won awards without being released and has yet more cringeworthy people-focused trailers that outdo those usually done by Nintendo. At least theirs are usually speechless. "This is action. This is story." This is a fucking card game, shut up.

All the accumulated money this man has spent on microtransactions.

The director for Elder Scrolls Online arrives and signposts the third asked-for-applause of this conference so far. "We're over 11 million players now" "We were named MMO of the year for the third straight year" Who are you trying to convince? Anyone watching this has at least a passing interest in your games but the self-congratulatory circle jerk that has been 99% of the show up until now can undo your achievements pretty damn quick. "On the off-chance you aren't playing Elder Scrolls Online" Yeah that's the kind of thing I'm referring to.

Marty and Hugo and their identical smiles introduce sequel Doom Eternal, stoking the fires of hype with rhetorical questions only to piss it all away by admitting there's no real footage until Quakecon.

Quake Champions' community manager decides to repeatedly ask for applause and hype instead of showing us anything. "We've been doing this for a long time." and yet you haven't learnt not to put *pause for applause* in your auto-cue scripts. The trailer has progressed from CG to gameplay in a year but still looks to be a pretty mediocre hero/class shooter bandwagon affair. Doom's reboot was classic yet modernised, Quake Champions just looks outdated. 

Prey creators announce an impressive amount of new modes and DLC for the game in between some dreary comedy and live action "bits"

I'd like to direct your attention to the excellent side-eye the audience member between them is giving.
It was pretty much my reaction also.

The unfortunately named Jerk Gustafsson and the slightly more fortunate Jens Matthies arrive to namedrop more awards they've received before finally announcing Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Set in the 1980's and starring the most unfortunately named protagonist BJ's twin daughters, the game will have co op and...that's all we know because all they had was a CG teaser trailer of course.

I guess it will probably be good based on the success of its previous outings but that mindset seems to be the theme of this conference which all its speakers are relying on for unearned praise. Beans Means Hines returns to announce Prey and Wolfenstein VR with nothing more than a logo for each before spouting the nontroversial yet recently repopularised opinion that is "fuck Nazis".

This baffling scene atop all the wanky award wielding and constant screaming interjections from the audience are enough to make me try and quit like Hitler or "do a hashtag #QUITLER" if I was being as try-hard as these fucks to appeal to blithering youths. Unless Pete Hines is actually Saint Peter Hines however, my attempt dismally fails.

Just in time to see him introduce Todd Howard like he's a fucking rockstar complete with strobe lights, theme music and audience wailing. Todd paces up and down doing his stand up routine before playing a comedy sketch that knowingly mocks how often Skyrim has been rereleased on different systems. Still did it though didn't you.

A lot easier to do this now that you have all the money from it.

Fallout 76's arrival does seem to improve the overall quality of the conference or perhaps Todd is just better at working the room. Alongside footage he mentions the many creepy new creatures, sixteen times the graphical detail and six different distinct regions to explore in virtual Virginia.

All good sounding features until he announces the game is always online. Mercifully this is not essential and he wisely goes on to dissuade a lot of the panic that phrase normally immediately instils. The audience banshee that went bath salts apeshit on syllable one of the sentence didn't know that however so I'm curious as to what exactly she was excited for.

You'd have to be insane or EA to think always online is an advantage so it can't be that. Possibly the pay cheque for crowd plant fake hyper upper she'll soon receive, although I wouldn't hold that in too high regard when it seems it'll be split among at least 50 other shit-flinging chimps in the auditorium.

Griping aside (momentarily) Fallout 76 looks very promising and a lot of fun. The darkly comic 50's Vault-Tec infomercials remain entertaining and go into depth on a lot of the game's features.

Todd also announces a mobile game I somehow don't hate. Elder Scrolls: Blades looks genuinely pioneering in being a console quality, substantial game with multiple modes, connectivity and useful settings to alleviate the irritations that often come with playing these more intensive and non-arcade action mobile games.

If you can at least avoid hand cramp while playing, I'll consider this a success. 

Surprisingly it is also free which me suspects may mean in app purchases but regardless it seems like a good quality title with a release date later this year...and it's not a bloody card game. The next announcement is Bethesda's "first wholly original franchise in 25 years" which I don't think really reflects well on them and their creativity but okay.

An incredibly brief teaser is hopefully not all we'll see of this for 25 years but it's called Starfield and it's presumably Sci-Fi and/or space-based. It tells us next to nothing but I'm not gonna knock new IPs too hard when narrow minded fanboys will do that for me.

What I will knock however is the standing ovation that a CG helicopter shot of a mountain got. This was apparently The Elder Scrolls VI which is an exciting concept in our heads where we can speculate and imagine but not so much on screen from the people actually making it. Was this "trailer" just to say that you're making it? Because you don't need to be a business savvy stockbroker to know that was the most obvious guarantee of a thing being made since Snoop Dogg started buying up greenhouses..

Difficult to know which was more annoying here. The public displays of sneering businessman reach-arounds, the humiliating death rattle of uninvited "comedy" or the playpen full of volumetrically challenged shitheels. Either way there was some interesting stuff here but it wasn't worth wading through all the sewage to get to.

Is this supposed to be an iconic region I immediately recognise? Because I checked with other people and it's not.

E3 2018 - Microsoft

"YOYOYO MA DAWGS MICROSOFT GUNNA MICRODROP SUM MICROHOT GAMEZ. BETTER MICROJOT THIS DOWN CUZ THESE MICROPOPPIN' GAMEZ ARE GONNA BRING ANNE FRANK DOWN FROM HER MICROLOFT!"

...Is the kind of introduction I was expecting after EA's painfully out of touch shitshow but Microsoft appears to have a bit more restraint with how blatantly they plead for recognition from young people. The kind of restraint I wish their hollering baboon audience would adopt.

Phil Spencer and his "constantly blinded by the sun but okay with it" face promise "creativity unleashed" alongside many other grandiose abstract and subjective pinnacles Xbonx will apparently reach very soon. The conference started however with a brief reveal of a new game in the 17 year old Halo franchise so it's hard to really find his words credible. Unless the unleashed potential of Microsoft's collective and cumulative creativity is in fact just an open world Halo game.

Phil finally says something of substance when he boasts the conference will show 50 games, 18 exclusives and 15 World premieres. Unfortunately being on-board the E3 rodeo for some time has taught me that 43 of those 50 games will likely be featured for half a second in a trendy montage about two thirds of the way through the show.

Admittedly what follows is a pretty non-stop relay of trailer after trailer, unfortunately the vast majority of them lacking gameplay and/or release dates.

The ever-cryptic From Software finally expand upon their Asian soundtracked bloody mechanism teaser from last year with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Samurai Dark Souls as it is no doubt already been renamed.

I'd like to state my support for ridiculously oversized hat shields.

Everyone's favourite Todd Howard, Todd Howard arrives to talk Fallout 76. Apparently it will be four times the size of Fallout 4 and if I have to keep saying bigger isn't always better for much longer I'm going to start sounding like my ex-girlfriend.

From those trendy French Life Is Strange creators comes a child simulator to rival Donald Trump. Captain Spirit is a boy's imaginary superhero persona with which you...live I guess through the game. Seeing the world through the unbridled imaginative and innocent eyes of a parasitic crotchgoblin with only a hint of alcoholism and domestic abuse. Sure to be quaint and mostly competently written but it's about kids and happiness so I'll be skipping it to crush my skull in a car door instead.

A Crackdown 3 trailer with Terry Crews going free reign nuts in the voiceover feels a bit sour when the game was delayed yet again just before the conference. Similarly Metro Exodus continues to approach with all the haste of a replacement bus service. The new trailer shows us a bit more story introducing technophobic religious fanatics as new enemies alongside ziplines, snowy environments and lots of clunky (in a good way) steampunk weapons.

Kingdom Hearts coming to Xbonx is apparently a big deal although personally having never touched these games seeing a disembodied Mickey Mouse head talk to an angsty JRPG antagonist feels like either a fever dream or some kind of vague satire.

"Oh boy! Please let me die."

Forza Horizon 4: Za Horizon For Xbox is a racey skiddy car game set in the UK. Familiar settings made this trailer mildly more interesting to watch than usual but not by much. A man called Ralph talks about dynamic seasons in a shared open world but feels the need to remind us what the word shared means by introducing all four of the usually faceless and nameless players of the following gameplay demo.

Then to remind us what seasons are, leaves are dropped on the audience from Chris the intern hidden up in the roof ventilation. A lot of needless bells and whistles for what is ultimately an online multiplayer racer where sometimes you can drive on a lake.

Throw some dog shit on them too for an authentic British atmosphere.

Phil "Denim and Donuts" Spencer returns to the stage to talk about all the smaller studios they've assimilated into the new Microsoft Hivemind®. Ninja Theory of recent Hellblade fame are now flying exbawks colours. The Initiative is a sinister sounding new studio supposedly going to create groundbreaking new IP's. Then there's three others I think and one is to do with zombies.

I didn't personally feel business acquisitions were all that exciting to announce on stage but the conference audience were going ham banana mental for it. Maybe next year they'll read their stocks and shares so the room can have a Wall Street wet dream over it.

Sea of Thieves continues to exist.

We Happy Few is only just approaching its full release after what feels like a lifetime but a new trailer suggests it now has the kind of darkly comical dystopian story mode I hoped it always would have. Whether this is separate from the disappointing survival gameplay it turned out to have prior to this trailer is unknown.

And speaking of unknown! Player Unknown's Battlegrounds gets a hip and happening new trailer revealing all new...modes and weapons? Did they need a big bombastic trailer for that? Couldn't you fit that information in a tweet?

I liked when things were finished before we bought them.

And speaking of unknown! I don't know what the demo for The Division 2 showed because I heard actors doing that god awful fake team speak again and went for a piss.

There's a skateboard, there's a JRPG, I'm going to be hearing "World Premiere" and "Exclusive" in my fucking sleep and another CG trailer follows for "Anime: The Game" where Goku, Narute, One Piece Man, that Deathnote chap and his feathered gimp all square off. While seeming like someone's runaway fanfiction project an anime smash bros will probably sell faster than EA's integrity so smart move.

Devil May Cry 5 is finally announced and to my bewilderment they are somehow combining the reboot and the old series together. So modern day clothing model Dante and albino red trenchcoat Dante now exist in the same universe.

I don 't quite know what to make of this but as the director and producer briefly explain on stage they have listened to the loud fan feedback and compromised with literally the best of both worlds. There seems evidence to support this as well with new Dante sporting a robot arm functionally reminiscent of Nero's popular devil bringer arm in DMC4. The tone also seems to have settled midway between the two versions. That is to say still completely over the top dumb and cheesy but somehow endearing.

I really hope he's just been riding that motorbike from DMC2 non-stop for 20 years.

This weird chimera could be a total mess and yet I am actually really looking forward to seeing where it goes. Perhaps it's Hideaki and Matthew's clear giddy excitement that I'm finding infectious since it's so rare to see that kind of sincerity at E3.

And speaking of rare sincerity, a rather cocksure narrative designer swaggers onto stage to recite a script about Dying Light 2, using terms that I think started to sound contrived about a decade ago. "The first in its genre to have genuine consequences based on your actions" is a baffling phrase to hear because I've heard it approximately 257 times before and very few games have ever managed it, at least to the lofty extent developers always brag it will.

A too self-aware, meme-threatening bare bones Battletoads game announcement is a sentence already more substantial than what was shown while Just Cause 4 looks like you'd expect but now with tornadoes.

So apart from a lack of detail and depth the conference is going quite well until Clancy Brown announces Gears Pop. A sound I unfortunately don't hear pulling the trigger by my head. A Funko Pop based Gears of War mobile game might be the least asked for thing in history since Henry VIII's second daughter and I'm pretty sure the crowd was assembling a lynch mob when Clancy swiftly also announced two more Gears titles.

A proper Gears game with sequel Gears 5 and the slightly less proper Gears Of War Tactics. The latter is a turn based strategy game seeming much like the Halo Wars spin offs although they squandered the opportunity to call it Gears Of War Wars.

Who is blackmailing you to make this? We'll all chip in for the ransom.

Phil returns to wax poetic and even the nearby technology wants him to shut the fuck up as the screen glitches and cuts him off to introduce Cyberpunk 2077, the long awaited Sci Fi title by CD Projekt Red. No gameplay but a lot of guns, debauchery and semi-human people in wacky clothing. If you picture an NRA meeting it's kind of like that but with wacky clothing.

Overall a decent showing by Microsoft but far too many purely CG trailers and distant release dates to both know very much about the games or get too excited for them. Not that you'd know of course because the audience seemed ready to rush the stage and suck Phil's dick which based on this conference, he doesn't need help with.

No one's watching on mixer, Phil...and they never will be.

E3 2018 - EA

The E3 schedule is a strange beast as EA kicking off your video games event is much like wheeling out a third degree burns victim to start your fireworks display. What is resolute in its consistency is the masturbatory montages that bookend these conferences. This is followed by a host arriving, intentionally not from EA to minimise the chance of them being torn apart by an angry mob.

"Ohmygoshhowcoolwasthaaat?" she preens. If you have to ask you'll never know, although 0 to cringe in under 20 seconds might be a new record.

Battlefield V developers appear and repeatedly make clear that this is "their vision of WW2." not necessarily a historically accurate one. The only thing for which they've researched that is the historical accuracy of objects thrown at the stage in E3 conferences. The announcement of a Battle Royale mode is met with the kind of audience reaction usually reserved for music concerts where a fantastic explosion of pyrotechnics kills the band and it takes a while to realise its not part of the show.

Fifa 19 has a CG trailer with uncanny valley CG faces and hey look they even brought a trophy out on stage! "Standing next to this trophy is a little surreal" claims one guy. Also surreal is the marketing team's state of mind when they consistently think this shit will in any way help sell their Windows 10 update of a game.

I don't usually use screengrabs mid-transition but pretending that there's a Ronaldo ghost mechanic is the only way I can stay engaged enough not to lose consciousness during these segments.

CEO Andrew Wilson ditches the soul grey suit for a dowdy jumper because his butler told him it makes him look more humble. His mouth moves for a time accompanied by noise and a screen displays "Origin Access Premier." Seemingly some new subscription shit for old and new games that means "you get access to the vault"

Hear that kids? The king has deigned you fit to lick the bird shit from his shoes for sustenance. Oh thank you grand keeper of wealth.

Meanwhile this content-starved production talks to a man about the cool things he claims to be making but could be entirely in his head. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order is apparently a game being made. The placement of the colon is unclear but that's par for the course at an EA conference.

Set between episodes 3 and 4 and due for release at the end of next year is all the other info our irritating host can drain from the reluctant dev who may have just been accosted at random since the cringey crumb dribbling interview hardly seems worthy of being a scheduled segment.

Fuzzy Lumberjack Willem Dafoe or Dennis for short is from Stockholm, works on Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and insists he's "really happy" and not at all suffering from his hometown's syndrome. At the same time we see bits of a muted trailer showcasing new content based on the box office cough "Solo".

Not content to just steal the name of a far better game, new levels for Battlefront 2 will feature Clone Wars-era content and the "largest map they've ever built." I'm pretty sure this stopped being a selling point ten years ago and yet without fail every year someone makes this claim like it guarantees quality. He finishes by submitting "we had a rough start" as his entry for understatement of the light-year.

"Hi, it's really good to see you." whimpers our next choked up developer sounding like this is the first time he's seen daylight in months. Unravel Two gets a gameplay demo where the now pair of yarn characters escape from an angry chicken and engage in charming co op platforming. This actually looked genuine and fun so an untainted gem might be visible through the otherwise sludgy trough that is EA's game output.

Denim Uri Geller is next to blabber bollocks for a while before a writer arrives on stage apparently having ran here all the way from Berlin. It's difficult to glean much information as everyone anticipates her collapsing from hyperventilating but she explains indie title Sea Of Solitude is all about loneliness turning you into an evil person so it sounds right up my alley.

More sports trailers follow, trying way too hard to be hip and cool, much like the pro gamers who swagger out talking swag with their swaggy clothes and why the fuck am I seeing this shit? The smugger of the two gives us his autobiography that approximately negative numbers of people asked for. Whoever he is we're told is successful and so his advice is "chase the money"

It's important to be unbiased and I don't want to report anything out of context in these reviews so just to reiterate and clarify.

                       "EA: We're out here chasing money"


The next nattering nobjockey appears with introduction as a "Professional shoutcaster" which as far as I can tell translates to insufferable overacting rejected sports commentator.

Dec took to comfort-eating to deal with his lacklustre replacement Ant.

A spectacularly tedious and lengthy match of a mobile Command and Conquer game doesn't so much capture our attention as rehabilitate it and release it back into the wild. As pointless as most CG trailers are, I think a character focused one for a top down mobile strategy game might be pointless beyond pointless. Unprecedented pointlessness. EA.

"We are always trying to learn and listen and strive to be better." declares EA's CEO from within a giant lootbox in between mouthfuls of Star Wars branded premium golden Ewok truffles. "Player choice" "fairness" and "value" are all words I'm trying to memorise he continues.

"As much as we love making games and you love playing them. There's something even greater we can do together." An entire auditorium clenches simultaneously and clocks the nearest fire exit.

Andrew of course means EA's sterling record of charity donations to anti-bullying organisations and the like. Demonstrating his new gameplay feature of lying whilst equipping his giant charity shield, Andrew makes a convincing argument for being the strongest character in EA's Battle Royale...Even if his iconic ash grey suit is paid DLC.

See? We care about whatever it is the majority of you care about.

Another CG trailer that somehow manages to remix a Muse song to sound more dramatic tries to make Anthem appear as the second coming of Christ. The actual discernible content however continues to portray a generic as fuck world full of dishwater denizens.

"There's a storm coming" "it wants to destroy us all" the characters claim and sure enough Casey Hudson enters on stage with Anthem's lead writer and some guy with a beard.

Casey claims his vision for Anthem is still focused on story and characters even though it's a shared multiplayer experience. They try to spin this as unique and groundbreaking but my cynical brain just pictures a confessional with Casey tearfully admitting "EA put our story-based game on a torture rack to stretch it out and make room for more players."

We learn the mech suits called "Javelins" are limited to four different types. Ranger, Colossus, Interceptor and Storm which at a glance (because we're only told about the first two) appear to be new forms of the Technician and Biotic classes from Mass Effect. You could probably also boil them down to Knight, Archer, Mage and Hybrid.

Our gnat bite of a host supposedly goes to twitter to pitch questions at the trio. Even if these aren't entirely fabricated I've no doubt they were so rigorously narrowed and selectively selected to the point where the three questions asked are probably the only ones they found that were fit to broadcast.

There will supposedly be no "blind purchases" or those that give "gameplay advantages" but still cosmetic purchases and no doubt later story DLC and season passes, limited edition wankmagnets and cummaguffins and they might just go back on their word for all this anyway because it's EA.

Story details remain vague suggesting an overall emptiness to rival my personality. You are a freelancing mercenary against enemies called "The Dominion." There are also monsters apparently and as they seem desperate to remind us at every opportunity; real-time weapon-sorry WEATHER change.

The scripted gameplay demo shows a tropical world reminiscent of levels from Mass Effect but with more bells and whistles. The mechs shoot guns and missiles until things die, grating dialogue tells us nothing of interest and the characters enter a cave where a big testicle falls in front of them and the footage abruptly ends.

When we've still seen little beyond hyper-edited trailers and repeated concept art it's difficult to predict whether Anthem will be somewhat enjoyable or not at all enjoyable. What it won't be is the trailblazing creative diamond the industry is foolishly hyping it up to be. In fact EA's internal and external pressure on the title to be the next Mass Effect trilogy in a single game is likely the biggest detriment to its potential success.

"How cool was thaaaaaaat?" asks Gnatasha for the fifth bloody time and as I pull the trigger to hear nothing but an impotent click, I open my eyes to see the conference has ended as limply as it begun. Oh well, five chambers chances left to go.

"Look I'm wearing pleb shoes and everything."