E3 2019 - Nintendo

Bookending the direct with Smash reveals works incredibly well in satiating all audiences. The first being the Dragon Quest protagonist meant very little to me but I know that series is huge in Japan. The second reveal being Banjo and Kazooie was more immediately exciting and a little surprising as they'd been rumoured basically every direct for so many years I was sceptical it would ever happen.

Full ethical disclosure I've never actually played the franchise I just think they look like a fun addition to the cast.

I skipped to the end a bit there because Nintendo had a really solid, consistently enjoyable showcase and to go into every game in detail would be a little redundant when the info is flooding across the internet right now. So mainly I thought i'd take the time to compare and evaluate E3 overall this year.

But first some instances I did feel were worth talking about, nay! needed addressing. Bowser's long-term unemployment and declining mental health is played for laughs in their opening welcome message and its disgusting.

We all saw the signs of potential misunderstanding when Doug Bowser took over from Reggie but actual Bowser got his hopes up for a more administrative position and was utterly shot down in flames. Metaphorically for once rather than literally and i think that's all the more painful.

For God's sake he even bought a tie for the occasion. Look at the size of his fucking head. An entire hall of mirrors couldn't make fastening that tie without a visible neck any easier and yet he persevered!

I think the main take away from this is that even with a CV as strong as Bowser's, corporate will always keep you down, down in construction and manual labour where you belong. Classism is rampant at Nintendo and you needn't look further than Bowser for proof...nor can you look further than Bowser...he's massive.

The reveal of a direct sequel to The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was something of a pleasant surprise. Comparisons are made to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask being the last time clear sequelisation happened but the continuation is even stronger here. This is a great move I feel, since BotW actually took some solid steps towards giving Zelda and to a lesser extent Link, some personality and character and this can be built upon now where most of the time that chance isn't there.

Not to mention I think most people were down for more adventure in the new engine and world plus the brief cutscenes shown suggest an immediate improvement upon the central villain, something many fans felt was a little lacklustre. I didn't mind Spider-Ganon myself, felt a bit like a Resident Evil boss but the more interesting conceptual idea of undying evil that Link and Zelda now seem to be tracking to the source is a cool direction for the sequel to take.

There's also a lot of sick imagery like this, which I'm very in favour of.

This is speculative of course but for a title ambiguously early in production, we were still shown more than a lot of other teasers in other shows.

I didn't have high hopes for EA or Ubisoft and yet some of the shit they pulled still took me by surprise. Bethesda were obviously on the back foot but often that's the best position for a good showcase of quality gameplay. They chose not to do that and even seemed to double down on their horseshit in places.

So the somewhat arbitrary "winner" title I'd have to definitely give to Nintendo this year. The output up until now was frankly really quite dire. As much as I love Keanu, a star studded cameo should not be all you have to offer in an announcement. I'm pretty sure Cyberpunk 2077 is going to hit so maybe they don't have to do much to sell but regardless, they didn't at this E3.

And bear in mind that was the best of Microsoft's showing. They were a firm second place in the ranking but Nintendo's felt more honest, polished and appealing even in the form of games I have no interest in. I think Nintendo's detachment from the majority of the industry remains one of its biggest strengths albeit sometimes also a weakness.

Where Microsoft felt compelled to play with theatrics and suspense, making every trailer as cinematic as possible yet simultaneously whoring the footage out with "Premiere", "Exclusive" and "Preorder now!" banners stuck all over them, Nintendo's basic, clean approach was refreshing and far less corporate.

Was I as gripped watching Animal Crossing: New Horizons as the Elden Ring teaser? No, but considering I had no prior interest in the AC series and now I might actually try this one whereas I remain still pretty in the dark with Elden Ring says something about the delivery of information at play here.

I hope I'm not turning into a Farmville mum.

I say it every year in probably every write-up, that CG trailers are almost useless these days, except for tone-setters early on. Even if gameplay is shown, this cinematic tendency and over-editing has more and more players becoming savvy and understandably sceptical of anything they see on screen.

I'd like to think one day companies might regain our trust enough to feel truly excited by a purely CG teaser but I think there's realistically more chance of F-Zero coming back from the dead than things becoming less overproduced.

So Nintendo doesn't bother as much with the pomp, the promises and the grandstanding and it immediately conveys as more clear, honest and enjoyable to watch, whether the trailers are actually more accurate than competitors or not.

They didn't have a flawless presentation. Things hit a bit of a lull in the middle and some of the games don't look like they'll set the world alite but they also weren't portrayed as if they were ever meant to. Bowser sketch comedy aside, Nintendo didn't faff around with their showcase and with the whole thing almost half the length of other shows, you can't claim the Nintendo Direct format is not...well, direct.

Perhaps E3's disappointment this year could be partly due to the noticeable absence of Sony but I can't help thinking maybe they made the smartest move of anyone. Not showing up if you've got nothing to show is a harsh but fair long-term plan that I honestly wish some of the conferences this year had followed suit in.

Also just saying, Donkey Kong Sitcom. That's free money.

E3 2019 - Ubisoft

I wake up in a cold sweat, my eyes instinctively darting to the nearest exit. I slowly draw myself from my bed and cross off another date from the calendar. It will be here soon. It's coming.

Of course the nightmares never left. Every morning is a gasping escape from the clutches of that traumatic time. Everywhere I go I see its face staring back at me but then perhaps it's my fault for frequenting the zoo so much. I am a haunted man, haunted by the spectre of a creepy dancing panda in a circus ringleader's costume.

I know its coming for me and I am utterly, pitifully powerless to stop it. My life has been devoured by this monster and its unknowable dark desires. My name is all that remains from day to day untarnished by the ravages of time. My name is Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft.

I breathe a sigh, I mean-Yves breathes a sigh of relief as the conference starts with a far classier orchestral performance, clearly a page copied from Sony's playbook. They play a kind of greatest hits of Assassin's Creed while the screen behind displays footage of a similar nature.

Turns out in the end, they were literally just a video game soundtrack orchestra promoting a tour. There's no actual game announcement behind this opening. Oh well.

Our first proper look at something comes in the form of Watchdogs 3 or "Legion" as it's being subtitled. Set in a dystopian London with some rather direct commentary on Brexit, It actually looks very promising, polished, entertaining and ambitious.

The biggest question is whether it can actually pull off its "everyone as a playable character" and permadeath premise. On top of this whether said formula will manage to give the characters any depth, individuality, story and interaction with each other. From a realistic point of view you would expect to see some pretty shallow templates and lots of duplicates to make the idea work but this initial look seems to suggest otherwise.

It's got Real-time Granny Assassin gameplay. I didn't know how much I wanted that until now.

Cautious optimism for Legion then but full marks for Ubisoft showing actual gameplay, at length and it proving genuinely impressive. So far none of the other shows have managed that.

Next we're told that Mythic Quest is a TV show from the Always Sunny In Philadelphia people parodying World Of Warcraft. So it's a TV show about making a video game which I guess qualifies it to be here but I can't say anything really jumped out at me. I might have been too distracted by the presenter closing on "without further adieu" which I'm going to hope is an in-joke from something.

Adventure Time is crossing over with Brawlhalla which barely means anything to me but maybe it does to you. Jon Bernthal is crossing over with Ghost Recon which barely means anything to anyone since we see more of Jon's dog on stage than actual gameplay.

Both games seem entirely reliant on star power and aren't offering a great deal beyond "hey look recognisable character/actor." In the latter's case, Jon sure gets plenty of time to act I guess but I'm starting to forget if this a video game conference or an actors award ceremony.

That said "E3 But With Dogs" is something I 100% support.

A quickly revolving conveyor belt of hosts and speakers keep on about Ghost Recon with ever more cringe and ever less tact. Ghost Recon Breakpoint also has a Terminator tie in because the producers need to buy favour at this point and everyone's apparently forgotten the actual films are shit now.

Poor Sam Fisher has been reduced to a character in a Ghost Recon mobile game and the conference's rapid shift reaches terminal velocity. Lulled into a false sense of security the Just Dance nightmare and its demonic panda overlord return and I'm told by hospital staff I went into a near-fatal anaphylactic shock at this point.

JustDon't2019

Once I was discharged and returned to the conference stream there were a host of underwhelming announcements awaiting me. For Honor's got a ghost lady, Rainbow Six has got zombies and The Division 2 has got a whole lot of nothing. Three separate episodes of nothing but still basically nothing. Of course they have to plug their upcoming Netflix movie as well.

A lady sounding as if she's taken tranquillisers to try and subdue the insufferable glee bursting from everyone's grinning eyes reveals Uplay Plus. Why anyone would want to pay for more of Ubisoft's digital beartrap clamped around their game library is a mystery to me but I appreciate this lady's attempt to be less punchable and cheese chuffing than every other theatritwat in this production.

Ubisoft's big closing title is from the creators of the last Assassin's Creed and is called "Gods and Monsters" Going full on into the mythology they've skirted around in AC for a while now. What does it play like? No idea. We're shown a frankly laughably brief trailer where all I could glean is that it's got the unappealing rubbery cartoon artstyle also shared by about fifty other games across E3 this year.

You could probably fit the entire trailer into a gif so I've elected to display this instead.

What a catastrophic decline into shit this conference was. It's nice to have had such a clear trajectory to observe for once but Watchdogs Legion was basically all they had. Their annual hour plus conference had essentially one game worth seeing. Given the grievances Bethesda had to overcome and EA being EA, this should've been a cakewalk for Ubisoft. Instead it was just cake...a urinal cake.

Please leave me alone.

E3 2019 - Bethesda

A rosy, chirpy, player-praising montage starts the show and I quickly realise I've seen this before. From EA, from Microsoft, probably Ubisoft and Sony at some point as well. It's the "we fucked up" intro. The "look how human and likeable we are, please trust us and give us money again" opening pitch. It even ends with a cliched "We are you and we are all Bethesda" which to me just sounds like you're trying to rope us into being culpable for your mistakes.

Unless you have an amazing beard I don't care. Don't @ me.

It's the man with the lines, Pete Hines who has shrewdly integrated himself into the audience for his entrance making it harder for snipers to catch him. He spouts many lines that mean very little before introducing the priority target Todd Howard who is frustratingly honest and frank about the colossal fuck up of Fallout 76. He also claims it has recovered into a large and lively community which I can neither confirm or deny but it's certainly the first I've heard of it.

Todd dodges off stage and we're told about the success of Elder Scrolls: Blades. The mobile game that was shown last year and is now apparently coming to Nintendo Switch...for "free".

Two expendable human shields arrive on stage to make ill-advised further statements about Fallout 76. "You've told us how much you've loved this year's updates" Have you? Can anyone fact-check this?

The audience members certainly seem hopped up on something as they scream and woop at the announcement of features that should've been in the game at launch. NPCs, story questlines and "dialogue trees" as opposed to whatever people were occupying their time with before. Presumably stockpiling ordinance in an attempt to entertain themselves by crashing the servers.

Apparently having sunk too much into it to cut their losses, the game is desperately pushed further with a free trial for the week of E3. A man I'm now dubbing Presumpty-Dumpty claims "Because so many of you will be joining us, we'll give you a sneak peek at a new game mode."

Remember when games just had modes and they weren't their own separate piecemeal announcement every time?

It's Battle Royale because of course it's sodding Battle Royale and these chucklefucks keep using the word "free" when we know damn well these things are lined with more microtransactions than the games have bugs. I'm either being unreasonably cynical or there's a lot of sneaky appeasement, underhanded tomfuckery going on here.

Next Shinji Mikami appears and introduces a new game's creative director, an incredibly earnestly cheerful and nervous petite Asian lady. Putting the least hateable person Bethesda could find on stage after banging on about Fallout 76 for over twenty minutes.

The game itself "Ghostwire Tokyo" involves the mystery of people disappearing, as you might imagine, in Tokyo. We don't actually see any gameplay so almost all impressions are still up in the air. This combined with the company's mixed output of a messy Evil Within 1 and an astonishingly improved Evil Within 2 also leaves the fate of this new title hard to predict.

Another featurette of the oh-so human people of Bethesda talking about their personal lives and how they have hopes and dreams and children and kneecaps just like you. The defensiveness is thick in the air and these personable emotionally manipulative tactics are starting to irk me. It's basically what EA was doing except they're trying to convince us they're not arseholes instead of emotionless synthetics.

Or maybe they really are just showing off members of their company because they think we care. In which case, I don't, get on with the presentation please.

The Elder Scrolls Online gets a lengthy and expensive looking cinematic trailer of different classes fighting a dragon. I'm repeating myself but this CG trailer tells us very little and I'm highly sceptical the fancy choreography in the sequence will be at all recreatable in the game.

Dragons are quickly becoming the new zombies
and not in a cool undead kind of way.

This fairly underwhelming segment brings up a more interesting question as to the hollering fuckwads in the audience. At this point, basically relentless in their screams and actually disrupting the speakers on stage with their "enthusiasm."

I try to avoid news and opinions until I've written these but I couldn't help notice the spreading suspicion of "paid actors" or "plants" in the audience. Designed to make this presentation seem far more positive than the genuine audience reactions would.

A less conspiracy theory-esque take is that these people are actually trying to appear fake and/or disrupt the presentation through high-volume sarcasm. I don't imagine you'd be allowed in the room long for actual heckles and jeers but no one can blame you for unrealistically enthusiastic praise right?

I mean I guess these look like real people.

The latter is just my take so maybe it's more outlandish than the former but the main take away is that pondering this was.more interesting than anything happening on stage.

This remained true for a horribly cringey new entrant, quoting Monty Python as though it were never done before and putting on her best Disney voice. The Commander Keen game associated was at least tonally consistent in that it was an insufferable, cartoon mobile game I would like to never see again.

Unfortunately for me, Pete Hines returns to put words in my mouth about "loving mobile games" and we're subjected to a live action trailer for Elder Scrolls: Legends. A mobile card game and latest entry into the growing series of franchise fringe titles. Outskirt spin offs designed to distract you and keep sucking at your wallet while you wait for the mainline title and the only game you actually wanted in the first place.

I'd like to file a Cease and Desist against my own higher brain functions.

Moving on, the desperate to be quirky and funny Rage 2 makes an appearance I rather wish it hadn't. Deathloop is a new FPS based around time-loops with two opposing main characters. The trailer was very stylish and conceptually intriguing but again, purely CG. The devs on stage getting giddy about saying "fuck" doesn't fill me with confidence though.

Bafflingly we're back to the diary room with seemingly every bloody Bethesda employee who've nothing but glowing recommendations and praise for the company. I'm not sure if they're trying to convince us or recruit us at this point but it's as superfluous as the first round.

Some guys from ID software wax lyrical and boast about their achievements before introducing Orion. A thing that makes streaming games better. Something that also cannot be accurately quantified at all on an E3 stage and thus is a waste of time at best and outright lies at worst.

Finally a trailer and demo for Doom Eternal plays which looks solid if a little too similar for a sequel. We're told about interesting new environments but aren't allowed to see them and Mr. Doomguy Slayer now makes battle grunts upon taking damage which feels unnecessary and distracting for a supposed ungodly strong super soldier. I guess they're saving anything more noteworthy for their beloved Quakercon. 

"Oof" - The Doomslayer.

A trailer for the "all new multiplayer" follows while I try to remember what I got my arse handed to me in if it wasn't the multiplayer of Doom 2016. The show then closes with yet more of its schmaltzy inspirational docudrivel claiming "You are the heroes" and other patronising insincerities. The choice of music with the lyrics "when I tell you to jump, you say how high?" also doesn't help alleviate this sense of backhanded grovelling present throughout.

So did anything other than Doom, riding off its predecessor's coattails, appeal or seem interesting the entire conference? Not really. Even despite the elongated staring at it for this write-up, if you asked me again tomorrow, I think i'll have forgotten most of it.

I expected Bethesda to be in full damage control mode this year but the way they went about it has actually done nothing to foster any goodwill towards them. Deviously worded statements to shift responsibility, straight up potentially false claims on player engagement, emotionally manipulative yet ineffective employee b-roll and whatever the hell was going on with the audience.

If I give the benefit of the doubt maybe it wasn't all as insidious as it seemed but regardless of that it also wasn't very enjoyable or exciting, which is the bottom line really. Given the IPs at their disposal, I feel like it took effort to be this much of a flat-line.

-thy source of expendable income."

E3 2019 - Microsoft

Boldly going where no conference has gone in a while, things start with a new IP we'd merely heard of before, Outer Lands. It appears to be familiar Fallout style in a new space-faring setting. Considering its production under Obsidian, those responsible for most of the good Fallout games, there is still some promise for this title.

Two people from Ninja Theory appear on stage proving their company name entirely accurate as only one of them dressed in all black and stole Matt Lee's face for disguise. They introduce their new game Bleeding Edge which looks to essentially be Overwatch in a Borderlands aesthetic.

Next up is Minecraft Dungeons which looks to essentially be Gauntlet in a Minecraft aesthetic. Phil Spencer arrives who looks to essentially be a jargon teleprompter in a mid-life crisis aesthetic. One noteworthy phrase was him claiming they have the "largest showcase of games on any stage this year" which considering Nintendo and Sony have both dropped out is a snide way of celebrating a rather feeble win by default.

A first person Blair Witch game of all things gets a trailer, a mere twenty years after the film. It looks like about a hundred other first person horror games but with a triple A graphical polish.

Cyberpunk 2077 gets a rather meaningless story cutscene with drama involving characters we don't know and the whole thing feels like a waste of time until the very end reveal that is Keanu Reeves somehow being in the game.

I guess that's where all the Witcher money Gwent.

The man himself proceeds to come on stage and chew the fuck out of the scenery in that detached, ambiguously self-aware way Hollywood actors often do at these events. The crowd hype couldn't be higher right up until they see the 2020 release date. Having played the frankly stupidly expansive Witcher 3 of the same developers, expecting a release this year seemed far-fetched to me. All the same it was a stony cold silence that washed over the crowd that otherwise never shuts the fuck up.

Spiritfarer is a cutesy little puzzle, platformer game with an artstyle like a heartwarming children's book and a vague plot with bestiality undertones. It seems like Microsoft always has at least a couple of games like this to show off and then they vanish off the face of the Earth with no review or reception anywhere. Perhaps it's just a bit outside of my usual radar.

Speaking of which they're still going ahead with the Battletoads thing. Like, they're actually making that...I don't know of anyone with any desire to play that unironically. Lassoed back to the formula we get the compulsory trendy pop song indie game montage. Right on cue and strictly regimented to show no more than an epileptic spasm of footage for each.

The bloody titles and pop ups constantly promoting exclusivity, world premieres and preorders get more screen time than this. 

From what I could glean there's a lot of isometric dungeon crawlers, pixel art shoot 'em ups and...nope, never mind. The fuckwitted visual operator unfathomably still employed has kept up his habit of switching to a pointless wide shot of the audience sitting in the dark.

A lady who will unfortunately spend the next several years being reminded how to pronounce "Imperator" promotes the actually increasingly good value Game Pass coming to PC. This essentially negates the need to ever buy an Xbox console so its value is a little baffling from a business perspective but don't look at a horse's mouth gift as my grandmother used to say...Shortly before she was arrested for equine trachea smuggling.

In the time it took me to write that joke, several other trailers played and none were interesting enough to prevent me from it so that one's on Microsoft.

Matt Booty has dedicated his life to looking as unassuming and uninteresting as possible to distract from his embarrassing surname. That was until he became the head of Xbox Game Studios and his name was plastered on a massive screen and announced loudly in front of thousands.

Matt said nothing of any great importance but did sound like he'd been shouting for hours at someone backstage, possibly telling them to stop laughing. To assist in the prevention of laughter he brings out Tim Schafer who introduces a rather lacklustre Psychonauts 2 trailer.

Weirdly Lego is going back to Star Wars and creating a game featuring all nine films of the "Skywalker Saga" and more weirdly I'm fine with this. Perhaps it just sounds appealing conceptually since we were shown no gameplay and little else, or perhaps the writers of the Lego Star Wars games are better than anything the franchise has produced mainline or otherwise for some time.

"12 Minutes" is a story-driven, time-loop affair which looks like it'd be pretty dramatic from almost any other camera angle. The top down view doesn't seem to have any purpose beyond a gimmick to initially stand out.

A Gears 5 conceptual trailer made by one of the angsty music video undergraduates I used to work with tells us almost nothing and evokes little more than mild cringe.

"It represents Capitalism."

Clancy Brown promises more info later at an event that isn't this one so he might as well have just projectile vomited into the crowd for all the usefulness that was. He did however claim they're trying to take Gears 5 in new directions never seen before...like "Arcade mode."

Another CG Gears 5 trailer appears to lean into the far more interesting horror aspect of the series until a dreadful remixed hip hop bollocking punctures the atmosphere and the trailer deflates like a bean bag full of melted sausage. Some pyrotechnics and pantomime tone setting had me half expecting a zombie Cliff Bleszinski to stagger onto stage but instead I just fell for the same trick again where a supposed horror atmosphere is a rug pull for something utterly dumb. In this case, a tie in with the new Terminator film.

Appealing to the niche crossover market of car enthusiasts and Lego fanatics comes a truly bewildering Forza Lego expansion which does actually at least succeed in making Forza look more interesting. That was a bar so low as to be underground though so it isn't saying much.

I'm sorry to whichever poor bastard had to assemble that but it wasn't worth it.

Crossfire X got a bizarre amount of build up for a purely CG trailer that looks so much like an unbelievably generic military action movie shooter as to possibly be an intentional parody. Probably wishful thinking on my part.

It is worth mentioning just how much stuff isn't worth mentioning in this Microsoft conference by the way. For several years now they've felt long and exhausting and not in a sexy way. Pointless add ons and tie-ins are starting to drag down the goodwill towards games that could well be fantastic but for some reason aren't allowed to stand on their own two feet.

Teeth-grindingly unfunny Funko Pop mobile spin offs, WWE wrestlers live playing Gears Of War, the sacred tradition of hauling a fucking car on stage even if it is made of Lego and the ongoing mystery no one cares enough to solve that is "Mixer." It all gives a very "weird uncle who doesn't really get your hobby and who kind of ruins it with shit he thinks is cool instead" vibe.

Moving on, the E3 hallmark of terrible camerawork lead me to believe we were seeing an Avatar game but mercifully it was just Borderlands 3 and some glowy blue tattoos . The game seemed fine if a bit try-hard in its edginess. After all, nothing says a punk rock aesthetic like censoring a middle finger to the camera.

Finally we get a short CG teaser of Elden Ring, the collaborative project of From Software and George R. R. Martin. There's little to tell beyond the familiar mysterious and epic tone. Themes of light and dark, life and death. It's typical of From Software to be secretive regarding details but suffice to say everyone is still riding on the names attached to this production rather than anything we've actually seen yet.

Fiddy Spence returns to introduce the next generation Xbox Console, which means a featurette of devs talking about amazing grafix, less loading times, bigger graphix, cross platform play, better graphical framerate and more powerful graphics.

It's apparently called Project Scarlett and I could show a picture that says the same thing but frankly this guy deserves to be seen more.

I want to believe it keeps going off-camera as well.

Announcing the console will launch with the new Halo leads into a CG trailer where some stranded chap runs into Master Chief and explains that humanity lost most and/or all of everything somehow. Seems like standard Halo stuff. I haven't followed it closely since Reach but it seems the game still hasn't regained its former glory from back when Bungie was developing.

Overall I think the best summary of events was my earlier use of the phrase "Win by default." Microsoft did have a lot of games but remarkably few of them sparked any interest for me. On top of this they also had a lot of stupid shit that actively instils me with ire and I genuinely don't imagine earns them any favour with any kind of crowd. Whatever their "expanding horizons" or demographic intentions might be, in my opinion it's overshadowing the games to a significant detriment.

Still, of the two I've watched so far, it was a damn sight more bearable than EA's AI BS.

Beep boop

E3 2019 - EA

The E3 conference seems to be a dying art as Sony joins Nintendo in dropping out of the idea entirely and EA adapts their show into a friendly, bro sofa livestream. Unfortunately "dying art" is basically the entire premise of my channel, blog and whatever I'm still doing here so we're going to cover this shitshow regardless.

As insufferably chummy as the host is, with knee-jerk laughter-counters to rival Jimmy Fallon, no one at EA's "sesh" seems any more human than the robotic suits of marketing we normally get. They do manage to drain my life-force twice as quickly however. Perhaps the lack of joy in taking the piss out of them is due in part to them not even attempting to be presentable.

Spot the human.

Speaking of presentable, we're presented with an "Alpha gameplay demo" of the new Star Wars game and starting off with a blatant lie is at least in-keeping with EA's standards. A very graphically polished sequence of traversal, sneaking and lightsaber combat follows, looking entirely as generic and underwhelming as the trailer did.

The Stormtroopers appear to be as much of a threat as an eroded Lego play-set of the old battle droids. You occasionally encounter some twirly double-sided stick guys whose ability to resist force push and pull by stabbing their weapon into the ground was the closest to anything inventive I saw in the entire demo.

The gameplay, the plot, the Forest Whitaker and everything else in between was nauseatingly fine but I honestly just wish after the Battlefront debacle that the licence had been passed to someone other than EA...If there's anyone left that is.

Our screamlord host sets himself up for humiliating audio manipulation with the phrase "that's what I want! Is a little boy!" after coaxing an applause from the audience. He goes on to quote a single positive sounding member of the twitch chat to try and prove what the gameplay demo couldn't before again pleading with the audience "you guys liked it right?"

They then bring out a twitching, beeping replica of the game's new droid and without missing a beat our host claims "I immediately want him as a backpack." We see the red targeting dot of the Disney Merch Snipers move away from his forehead and the crew discuss in fairly vague and bland terms, the vague and bland gameplay we just saw. It is also worth noting the 60-80% of the audience with identical EA-branded backpacks...

"It's Star Wars, it doesn't get any bigger than this!" And I contractually can't open my eyes or mouth lest all the money fall out.

The next feature is about an event or some new weapons or something for Apex Legends. I admittedly haven't followed this game but I genuinely think the entire piece was in another language. "Battle Pass, R301, meta wraith, memeable weapon stack, untamed care package, Battle Pass, double XP, Hopped up on Battle pass, elite queue, Battle Pass" Fuck's sake I feel old.

When I finally did understand something again in the reveal of a new character, I still didn't really understand it. Much like Overwatch, this trend of hyping up characters and their backstories only for them to be practically invisible and unexplored in a purely online multiplayer FPS is bafflingly pointless to me. These games have no story mode and yet a weird amount of time is wasted on their supposed story.

At this point we've had about three different identical hosts giving this forced hype-man, excessively-American, cheer everything, applaud everything, don't think, just consume, chode-faced wankery and my will to live is basically flat-lining. So moving on to Battlefield V where it seems after Battlefield 1 being based on World War One, Battlefield Five is based on...World War Two...This is not helping my headache.

Maybe it's the amount of separate parts the game is being released in.

To give you a summary of the kind of in-depth and enlightening conversation happening during these interviews I will quote Dice's Ryan McArthur "I think fruit's important when you're doing game design." To his credit it is more so the interviewer's constant, desperate need to try and be funny that is forcing these kinds of brain-liquefying answers. That said though, FUCK.

Skinny Swedish George Lucas appears to talk about some spectacularly inane tweaks to multiplayer then new maps in Greece, a subway and Iwo Jima are revealed. Due to BV's episodic nature it's actually quite unclear if they're single or multiplayer features but I guess they look like cool backdrops to do the same old Nazi shooting against.

The hosts finally stop making war PTSD jokes and we move onto Star Wars Bafflefront, relegated to a spot in the intermission where we're assured "Our community is really happy" and "our subreddit is full of love."

Even brand-loyal, climate-confused hoodie man couldn't keep a straight face.

Next up is EA Sports Now That's What I Call FIFA 2020 where Rio Ferdinand describes street football and how "You are forced to almost have a personality in there."

Quietly corralled into another intermission was Anthem's lead producer who insists they've "learned a lot of lessons over the last four months" and are "listening to player feedback better." Judging by the immediate player feedback from the crowd I have to say the excitement and goodwill surrounding the game was "palpable."

The show continues with half an hour on Madden NFL. The Sims 4 is EA's big finish with their tropical island expansion. How you're supposed to trap them in the water when it's an entire ocean and there's no ladders remains to be seen.

The devs tried to explain features like water-sports, volcanoes and conservation careers but the host kept interrupting with her shit jokes. All in all, it looks like a Sims game and probably the least tedious part of EA's entire couchference. Even if the devs did insinuate Dolphin-Mermaid intercourse at one point.

More stranger-danger hosts, disingenuous charity guff and vacuous small talk top off three hours of my life I'll sadly never get back but more tragically had nothing better to do with.

In conclusion, if EA keeps trying to backpedal their constant corporate insidiousness with this insincere, over-friendly, buddy-casual chat-show crock they're going to end up as cringey as Ubisoft and I'm going to end up having a fucking aneurysm.

Perhaps The Sims is the only honest seeming franchise EA has left because it too involves unconvincing facsimiles of human life.

Assassin's Creed And Its Origins Story

When I was done with Assassin's Creed: Origins I realised I was also done with the series overall. Rather than the considered and thoughtful revitalisation I had hoped for AC:O ended up feeling just as slapdash as prior titles that were rushed out in Ubisoft's ill-devised annualisation attempts.

Not at first it should be noted. Bayek is a simple but effective protagonist and his story is decently set up. More surprisingly, the themes of parenthood and children are frequently reinforced in a lot of the game's side missions. His motivation is relateable and straightforward and while perhaps a little too cheery for a man whose son was killed before his eyes, he's certainly human and likeable enough for us to become invested in his story.

Unfortunately the writers of Origins were not so invested and a little way into act two we find the plot's focus wavering. The backdrop of Egyptian, Greek and Roman political tension serves for the game's necessary conflicts and opposing territories that require stealth and espionage.

As the plot branches out however, we find ourselves increasingly entangled in the political affairs of others, to the point where Bayek himself expresses frustration at dutifully helping citizens but craving vengeance against his son's masked murderer.

A character and therefore the writers being aware of such an issue muddies the waters of their actual intentions for the plot. Nevertheless being aware of a story problem doesn't negate it and when this tangent is not only continued but exacerbated well into the third act, the initial plot has wandered off into the desert, taking our emotional investment with it.

At the climax of the story you could be forgiven for not knowing who the main character is. The series continues its ever less subtle and smooth "celebrity cameos" with historical figures Cleopatra and Julius Caesar taking over the spotlight. In addition however Bayek's wife Aya also receives increasing focus.

It at first appeared that the game switched to playing as Aya for its naval sections as she pursued potential culprits overseas. Unfortunately this then gave way to standard gameplay sections and not only that but pivotal moments in the story that we should have been experiencing through Bayek.

This baffling and easily avoided pitfall strikes me as the trepidation of the dual protagonist set up in Origins' following game AC: Odyssey. Why there needed to be any fear around this hardly revolutionary concept is beyond me but its half-arsed and non-committal implementation in Origins weighs it down like an anchor.

Being Bayak's wife and mother of their murdered child, Aya has the same motivations as our protagonist and is just as capable, having already scratched off two names in the suspect hitlist when you first meet her. A dual protagonist story could have easily worked here and yet the cognitive dissonance at play is that Aya's gameplay is an afterthought but her presence in the story only grows as time goes on.

The aforementioned political maneuvering becomes the story's and Aya's main focus. While not impossible to have made this interesting we're still playing as Bayek for the majority of the time, even if we're reluctantly pursuing Aya's goals.

Perhaps it was the writer's intention that we empathise with Bayek's frustration at the distractions and impediments blocking his path to revenge but this goes on for two thirds of the entire game. When the masked murderer is finally revealed as Ceasar's right hand man with no prior connection to Bayek or Aya, nor substantial interaction with either of them, it's not a bombshell or even a relief but a unexpected reminder of a plot that was all but forgotten up until this point.

So rather than a fitting elaborate infiltration of a fortress to sleuth your way to the final target, you just have a face to face, annoyingly elongated sword fight with the guy. He teleports around with the infamous "Apple of Eden" artifact which whilst not a relic in this time setting is certainly a fossil from an age back when this series appeared to have any idea where its overall plot was going.

Bayek gets his revenge on the man and the central quest seems complete. The story however, continues with Aya chasing down another of Caesar's subordinates and eventually the roman dictator himself. Not because they had a hand in the murder of her child but just because they're pricks and the game can't create an impressive finale of its own so it has to score more history channel points re-enacting the death of Caesar.

What follows are the actual origins of the titular cult of Assassins and its centred around a jaded Bayek and Aya miserably ending their relationship for not entirely clear reasons. Bayek seemed willing to keep trying but Aya is apparently now more invested in all the political movements of the region...At least someone is I suppose.

Bayek denounces his title, his marriage and his fatherhood before leaving Aya to look at the series logo created in the sand. Our broken husk of a main character is then superceded by footage of Aya's creed of assassins parkouring about and slitting throats.

I certainly didn't expect an order of assassins to be built on a fluffy foundation of bunnies and birthday cakes but after the meandering sidetracked plot finally reaches this conclusion i can't help but again  empathise with an exhausted Bayek. What was the point in it all? When did it stop being about good, pure eye for an eye revenge murder and get embroiled in crowns, thrones, betrayals and politics? Did this game's plot unknowingly mirror the over-complication and desaturation of the series' progression as a whole?

All I know is finishing AC: Origins was a chore and without a memorable or satisfying story to look back on, looking forward just shows a tedious list of side quests, unnoticeable incremental upgrade bars and a beautiful but shallow world map to fill out. Origins is by no means a train wreck but weirdly I almost wish it was, just so there'd be more of an impact.

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.