E3 2015 - Ubisoft

Starting with a sequel to South Park: The Stick Of Truth, the non-gameplay trailer for South Park: The Fractured But Whole, (no, none of that is a typo) appears to be parodying super heroes this time with its (in?)famous style of cartoon comedy.

Rather than put a standard employee of Ubisoft on stage and risk them getting shot, Aisha Tyler (who has other credits to defend herself)  steps up in her pyjamas to introduce Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park, who chew the fat and refreshingly near-enough admit that they didn't know what they were doing with the first game and that they might regret trying again.

Despite all this, the crowd goes nuts for them and assuming Fractured But Whole is at least as solid and well written comedy-wise as the first game, it will likely do very well.

Aisha does the mandatory welcome jabber before surprisingly drawing attention to the elephant in the room, describing "an intense year for Ubisoft" with "no shortage of constructive criticism". She goes on to modestly whisper Ubi's praises and with much trepidation introduces Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, before sprinting off the stage for fear of her life.

"Aisha please don't run with such animation! You'll double our workload!"

Looking like Picasso flung through Steve Job's wardrobe Yves starts begging for his life with declarations of love for games, game creators and gamers. The subtext is obvious enough but bigwigs in any media shouldn't really have to profess their passion for their chosen industry, it should be evident through their actions, but i suppose therein lies the problem.

Introducing a "new IP in a new genre" a CG trailer shows scenes of Medieval warfare with the polished cinematography and soundtrack of an Assassin's Creed trailer. Seemingly following three different protagonists; a European Knight, a Viking and an Eastern Samurai, "For Honor" whilst having a very nice trailer, doesn't look especially groundbreaking so far.

Creative director and actual Viking Jason Vandenberghe grunts and bellows his way onto stage giving an awkwardly eccentric motivational speech straight out of Braveheart as though the audience were also stuck in the time period of the game.

"When a sword is coming at your head...Do you turn and run?"
If you're holding it then yes Jason, definitely.

He brings on two teams of four gamers to give a live demo of the melee based warfare game. Initially looking like a more grounded Dynasty Warriors it then shows relatively realistic (but still entertainingly stylish in places) one on one sword duelling in authentic-looking medieval locations. This second part looks more like early Assassin's Creed swordplay but with depth seemingly akin to that of a fighting game.

For Honor certainly looks interesting and fun but is it a whole new genre? I fear Ubisoft is following another of EA's bad habits in overstating their work, when it should really speak for itself. The demo is surprisingly short with no release date announced, but I'll admit I'm intrigued and hopeful for this historical warfare action game.

Although that's three different special editions they can make already.

Next comes some bragging about The Crew and a non-gameplay trailer for an expansion called Wild Run. Aisha continues by introducing a game that "there are no words to describe" which is odd because i can think of several such as "Non-gameplay" and "Another fucking expansion". This time for Trials Fusion, a bike riding game trying so hard to spice itself up it's desperately thrown in cats riding fire breathing unicorns straight from a five year old's imagination.

A semi-gameplay trailer for The Divison follows with some idealistic fake multiplayer voice chat and Wilhelm screams. The online open-world third person shooter and RPG seems pretty functional for such an unwieldy and ambitious genre description and the apocalyptic disease ridden New York setting is more interesting than some shooters.

The game seems to be pushing the idea of trust and betrayal both within your team and other teams regarding loot you find or steal around the city. This sounds great in theory and in this clearly rehearsed trailer it's very tense and dramatic but I'm sadly almost certain it will just be a giant clusterfuck online. Regardless this much hyped title releases 8th March 2016 if you're interested.

To be accurate this commentary needed approximately 3000 more expletives
and crudely worded questions regarding player's sexuality..

A CG trailer is followed by an unclear but hopefully at least partially gameplay trailer for Sci-Fi RTS "Anno". We cut back to Aisha chatting up a Jacob Frye cosplayer and cringingly trying to force a meme out involving Rickets.

"One of the pillars of the Ubisoft family" is apparently Just Dance 2016 which is worrying news as they proceed to set demolition charges with an excruciating live demo/performance from Jason Derulo. The obligatory album plug and arse-licking follows this promotional literal song and dance with an awkward question about what Jason Derulo thinks of the franchise. In case you're wondering his niece and his mum apparently enjoy playing it so...that's me fucking sold...

Why are popstars always wearing ill-fitting jackets?

When that ordeal finally ends we get another CG trailer for tactical team-based FPS Rainbow Six Siege, followed by a sycophantic interview with actress Angela Bassett who plays the team's boss and overseer in the game.

Thankfully a live gameplay demo of the single player campaign brings the conference back to something of value and overall this newest title seems very polished with solid gameplay involving both stealthy infiltration and spy gadgets plus door-breaching explosives and hectic gunplay. A beta starts 24th September 2015.

Trackmania Turbo's trailer is apparently entirely gameplay and in-game replay footage. A madcap racer with a fairly realistic art-style but track designs, speeds and physics closer to something like F-Zero. We're given a brief live-demo featuring one of over 200 different tracks and another race on a randomly generated track using an in-game randomise feature.

Arguably an updated remake from the DS version of the game, Trackmania Turbo is at least not another expansion or team-based shooter and with its Evel Knievel level design it looks pretty fun to play.

But then i could probably just get the DS version for cheaper.

Next is Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Starting with a lengthy CG trailer featuring Jacob Frye's cockney gangster brawling and annoyingly finishing with it as well. We're told of a gameplay demo for those attending E3 but presumably there wasn't time to show it on stage, which is a shame when there was time to ask Jason Derulo about his mindblowing opinions on Just Dance's place in pop culture.

Ubisoft's finale comes in the form of a mostly gameplay trailer for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands. It promises a massive open world and team-based third person shooting which I'm getting a bit sick of writing so you must be oversaturated to numbness of reading it. Until the title appeared i thought Just Cause 3 had taken a grittier, team-based direction which tells you a lot about the game's mechanics and setting.

And that's Ubisoft's conference. Plagued by purely CG trailers and some gum-grindingly awkward speakers. The sycophantic, glitzy Jason Derulo section being a personal lowlight but having said all this, the audience seemed pretty excited by everything shown. There were no noticeable deathly silences and people apparently buy shit like Just Dance enough to make it "the biggest music video game franchise of all time".

So nothing breathtaking from Ubisoft but i suppose no glaringly horrific missteps either. A lot of teasing, guest-pleasing and forced hype cheesing. Hopefully one of these games won't trip over its own hubris on the way out.

Why are you talking to this guy about rickets when
Joseph and his technicolour dreamcoat are sitting right behind you?

E3 2015 - EA

Opening with a Mass Effect 4 trailer (Now titled Mass Effect: Andromeda) is an undeniably strong start even if the trailer itself is a bit of an oddity. First of all the Johnny Cash soundtrack is very unexpected but i suppose symbolic of the different and separate galaxy we're told this story will explore to the Shepard trilogy. We see the hand of a masked person in N7 armour, flicking through a series of images or live feeds of alien worlds.

The display collapses into either a galaxy map then possibly just a window and whatever ship the character is standing in warps quickly to the orbit of a red planet, bringing into question the advancement of technology in this galaxy, as travel that fast was only previously possible with the Mass Relays.

We get a few brief glimpses in-between black screens of a new land vehicle, similar to the Mako, jetpacks or at least boosts on the back of our character's suit. Shields, omni-tools and seemingly the omni-blade are all still present which aside the N7 armour makes me wonder exactly how different this galaxy is if it's retaining all this technology and establishments from the old trilogy.

Is it possibly a parallel galaxy? So N7, Omnitools etc will be entirely redefined?

Aside from that there's no clear look at our enemies, teammates or any species under their armour at all actually. Very much a teaser but as a huge fan of the Mass Effect series, consider me very damn teased and alert for at least the start of the rest of this conference.

A pointy grey suit welcomes us all and then struts around talking about how EA are inspired to play and how playing gets them up in the morning. This is news to me 'cos i assumed their butler or their expensive supermodel prostitutes would rouse them from dreaming about paid DLC every day.

"How do i sleep at night? Always on-linen."

Mr slicked back everything goes on to thank the audience. "You make us better" he says, wisely dropping the word "off" from the original script of this speech. Admittedly fifty shades of grey then quite promptly exits the stage and gets on with a Need For Speed trailer that starts and ends like an urban deodorant commercial but somewhere in between there's some cars racing, police chasing and high speed collisions.

Difficult to know if it was in-engine footage or not since video game cars are graphically photo-realistic at this point. The next male model speaker continues to describe this "definitive" open world Need For Speed experience as the footage shows some actual gameplay with what seems a smooth, robust but expansive car customisation feature, and the actual gameplay, driving through city streets, avoiding police, drifting and such.

My interest in racing games declines as the realism increases so i try to give a fair account of this preview despite basically not giving a shit about it. It looks good i guess if you like that sort of thing.

We next hear from a man with no eyes talking about the RPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic's upcoming expansion called Knights Of The Fallen Empire. As if "Bioware" itself were now a buzzword we're promised twice "Bioware style storytelling" with choices that matter and a dynamic player driven story. At the same time the footage on-screen shows two bald generic looking Jedi guys doing Jedi things together. None of it's gameplay so at the risk of sounding flippant, none of it matters. However this expansion is coming 27th October 2015 completely free so can't complain too much.

May the blunt force trauma that took your eyes never be with you again.

Another slick and slim suit steps onto stage and claims to have something "unlike anything else you will see here today." Unravel is a yarn-based physics-based puzzle platformer by Swedish developers ColdWood. Whose creative director is far too giggly, nervous and innocent to be at an EA press conference.

The game itself is similarly quaint and cutesy with "Yarny" Spiderman-swinging his way across real world levels but with that miniature person puzzle logic like lassoing a fish to drag your twig raft across a pond. It looks very nice and quite inventive but not exactly  "unlike anything you're expecting" Nintendo have been messing around with stringy platformers like Kirby's Epic Yarn and Yoshi's Woolly World for a while now.

Unless of course the developer's poetic metaphors about the "thread of life" and emotional connections actually feature in the game in some way. In which case I'd be far more interested. But overhyping from the suits aside, Unravel looks thoroughly charming and a lot of fun.

Suddenly lights start flashing, "Danger Zone" plays over the speakers and a big zombie minion mascot clomps onto stage, posing for the audience and generally making everything very strange, corny and surreal. Before too long the zombie is sent away and we learn that this charade is in promotion of Plants VS Zombies: Garden Warfare 2.

Don Mattrick's career options are limited these days...

I'm sceptical of anything that advertises its "craziness" and "wacky hilarity" as much as this and most of the humour doesn't appeal personally, but as a class-based third person shooter it looks solid enough and quite creative. Asking the audience "How fun does that look?" however was a stupid idea as our latest suited man gets nothing but silence in reply.

He then reveals something that i never thought I'd see needing an announcement. A single player mode. So this series was exclusively multiplayer up until now? That sounds fucking awful. Single player shouldn't be a feature, it should be a staple. I'll concede that things like splitscreen have sadly lost their necessity with more constant online connections but entirely multiplayer games creep me out...Maybe I'm just an antisocial hermit.

Speaking of things I'm unfamiliar and uncomfortable with it's EA Sports. They have a hockey game that looks a lot like hockey, a golf game that looks a lot like golf. In terms of the latter they're claiming no load times which is good and there's realistic real world courses or "fantasy" sets where you can golf over the grand canyon or something, which is kind of cool.

A basketball game looks a lot like basketball until they bring up "GameFace HD Scanning tech" and an NBA Community manager called "The Hoop God" and everything gets piercingly awkward. If you've ever wanted to see a scruffy black guy pat a fat white businessman in the stomach, who then proceeds to steal his face with an iphone app and project it onto a basketball player in front of a huge crowd...Well firstly, seek professional help and secondly, EA does just that, because "we make it a priority to listen to you" apparently.

"Rangers! Angel Grove is under attack by a giant parasite known only as Origin"

"The Hoop Gawd" does finally peace out but not before he prophesises the prerequisite "Freshness" to enjoy NBA Live 16. The chunky suit claims they spent two years on their motion animations and controls and what's more you can "up your swag" which i roughly translated as skill upgrades.

EA's mobile division talks crushingly dull statistics briefly and announces a new mobile Star Wars game called Galaxy Of Heroes and another based on those Minion things. Minion's Paradise is a kind of city management and mini-game thing based on a tropical island. If you actually find those yellow tumours funny then maybe you'll like it i guess.

Continuing EA's tendency to exaggerate, a guy from FIFA 16 introduces "the greatest football player of all time" Pele'. Pele' recites anecdotes for a solid five minutes as the speaker turned interviewer next to him gazes lovingly into his eyes.

Go on, touch his knee.

I'm sure Pele' is a very accomplished even legendary player in his field but i know nothing about football and care even less, so this entire section is wasted on me and just appears like a fanboy gushing over an interview with a personal idol and an audience sitting there in awkward silence. Pele' exits the stage to a polite applause as our flustered Fifa fellow tries to continue describing the game's mechanics.

The only noticeable new feature is playable female footballers. They claim to have been developing female players for ages but i can't help thinking this seems a very topical addition given some of the recent criticisms of Ubisoft and other companies regarding female characters.

Mirror's Edge 2 or Catalyst as it's being called, will be an origin story of the protagonist Faith battling against corrupt, invasive corporations. The core gameplay appears to remain the same but some significant changes include an entirely open world with supposedly no loading screens and no gun combat, only melee martial arts.

The following in-engine trailer looks very enticing as a dystopian future focused on mass-surveillance and privacy invasion.The first game hinted at this kind of world but the story seems far more fleshed out this time. Mirror's Edge Catalyst has a release date of February 23rd 2016.

These themes being presented at an EA conference is more than a little ironic.

EA bigwig Peter Moore brings in the conference's finale with Star Wars: Battlefront. One of the developers then tells us the game will feature 8-40 player matches providing a range of options depending on what kind of scale you want to fight on. As i was just lamenting the death of splitscreen earlier, I'm delighted to hear that Battlefront will in fact have local splitscreen multiplayer, as well as at least some of the film's stars as hero and villain characters.

Our final preview comes in the form of Pre-Alpha gameplay footage that already looks pretty fantastic and shows off arguably the best level from Battlefront 2, the planet Hoth. The map seems vastly expanded, third and first person viewpoints remain, all the vehicles you'd expect and despite there being no space battles, this iteration seems to have not squandered the extra time and space by putting a lot of effort into refining the existing gameplay.

So overall some slimy suits, terrible comedy, desperate audience pandering and mind-numbing sports talk with some promising and good-looking games scattered in between. I suppose i should give them credit in that i was prepared to not sustain consciousness for the entire duration but did in fact, stay awake. Just.

As forced and unnatural as it sounded, EA's constant insistence about player feedback, and listening to the consumers did actually have a little proof backing it up. At this point they might have finally been overtaken by Ubisoft as the evil, money-sucking corporate overlords of the gaming world. I guess I'll find out soon at Ubi's own conference.

E3 2015 - Microsoft

So all of Xbox's major players start the show with a collaborative motivational speech about the difference between stepping and leaping, (the difference is you tilt the analogue stick more and sometimes have to press a button). This intro again reminds me of how few iconic characters Xbox really has of its own. There's the scowly, battered steroid face of Marcus Fenix, the green and orange helmet of Master Chief, the blue and grey helmet of someone also from Halo, Tomb Raider which...I don't think anyone expects to really stay exclusive for all that long and some pirate guy from a game that is yet to even be announced. More on that later.
 

Bonnie Ross is the first to step onto stage and after some words that sound awfully chilling and echoing in Microsoft's venue. A trailer for Halo 5 Guardians leads into a gameplay demo. A new squad of Spartans (possibly from Four, haven't played that one) lead by Spartan Locke (the blue-grey helmet from the conference intro) are on a mission to hunt down the missing Master Chief. Not having followed the plot since 3, this seems like a nice twist for the story. The trailer is damaged however by a big obnoxious "Preorder Now" banner popping up halfway.

The core gunplay seems intact but with more jet boost jumps, platforming, some simple gadgets and squad commands. The level design itself is interesting enough with the expected Halo spectacle. Sci-fi explosions, lasers, spaceships and aliens all looking very polished on Xbox One. Dialogue exchanges within your team build up the plot and connection to the characters. I'm presuming they took this cue from Halo Reach and your crew members will probably be offed in a similarly gradual dramatic fashion.

Spartan Locke isn't contractually obliged to say less than ten words per-game either.

A boss teleports in and the demo transitions back into a trailer before Josh Holmes (A man so ordinary I couldn't find a joke or celebrity lookalike) from 343 talks about Halo 5: Guardians being the most ambitious instalment yet as the narrative seemingly splits between the squad hunting Master Chief and Lego head himself with his own squad, searching for one of the titular "Guardians". 

The multiplayer maps are apparently four times their normal size which isn't necessarily a strength depending on the actual design but the following trailer for a new multiplayer mode called Warzone appears to put the expansive maps to good use. Seemingly combining team deathmatches with the survival elements and waves of enemies from Firefight, bringing multiplayer duels closer to skirmishes on a warzone...Oh I see what you did there. 

Unfortunately another stupid banner pops up pointlessly telling us this is a "World premiere" In case people were accidentally watching the other massive Xbox conference on at this time? Or someone else's conference that has ever featured Halo? Great way to patronise and prod your audience Microsoft.

Next up the man behind Megaman and the makers of the Metroid Prime Series bring us a brand new exclusive set in a dusty desert apocalypse with an acrobatic young woman marksman and her robot dog. The developer credentials are already an impressive start and the game looks interesting but I can't help feeling manipulated a little too early as hostile robot spiders attack our pair and the robodog self-destructs to save their owner.

Having the dog die seriously messes people up emotionally. This is evident throughout all types of fictional media, you can't do that to us less than a minute into the first ever reveal of the game. Have you no heart?
Admittedly the sandy rug is somewhat pulled from under us as the dog's central glowing orb remains intact and can apparently just be whacked into any other mech-type-thing and the girl's companion is back to life. I'm hopeful for Recore but it's not a good first impression to leave people feeling emotionally violated and betrayed like that. Shame on you.

Emotional manipulation only on Xbox One.

Literally taking centre stage on a questionably pointless podium within the crowd, Phil Spencer turns up in his Sunday worst to wax lyrical and announce a genuine surprise in the form of backwards compatability for the Xbox One. This deservedly sends the crowd wild and Phil Spencer soaks up the applause into his shiny, sweaty face skin, before handing over to his dowdy cardigan protégé Mike Ybarra.

Mike claims over 100 titles will automatically appear for digital download by the holiday whilst your old retail disks will also function after a vague sounding "download" so it appears an internet connection will be necessary either way.

Capybara goes on to demo a few seconds of the first Mass Effect on Xbox One with the added capabilities of voice recognition screenshot taking and streaming footage over Xbox Live, followed by this baffling statement. "We won't charge you to play the games you already own"

This is said as though it were a snappy slogan zinger or something worthy of applause rather than something that should've been inbuilt from the start and whilst good, is yet more backtracking by Xbox to undo their myriad of mistakes with the initial Xbone release. Still, the audience seem to lap it up so maybe it's enough for some.

"Yeeesssssss feed me your hopes and trust."

A new Xbox One "Elite" controller is in the works, with additional triggers, switches and customisable parts. Having not used an Xbox One controller I wasn't aware there were such major problems with it that might require a redesign. It seemed near identical to the 360 pad upon release but maybe this is as simple as it seems and is just a more advanced choice for advanced or competitive gamers. In which case, I can't fault them for giving players choice. Let's hope it's functional and durable without an insane price tag.

Next comes a familiar face in the form of Fluffhew Mcconaughey, talking about Fallout 4 and showing a slightly different gameplay demo montage to that of Bethesda's own showcase. We're told Fallout 4's PC mods will be functional and transferable to Xbox One versions of the game for free, which as a limited PC gamer but a big fan of the madcap and often hilarious efforts of PC modders, this seems like a real strong point for Xbox to have over its competitors.

Following this we have Peter Moore on behalf of EA looking like a lazily inflated Ben Kingsley and for once wearing nearly a fifth of enough grey to begin to match the colour of his soul. He spouts some words about something called EA access as my attention wanes before plugging the tranquiliser straight into the vein with Madden NFL 2016. A tepid round of applause as he continues to celebrate the early access this service gives and the "vault" of great titles included, which turns out to be twelve. I'm not sure 12 games would fill up a suitcase let alone a vault.

The big new additions being TitanFall and DragonAge Inquisition which I’m sure are good games but for a weird paid service that seems to give you a few weeks early access to certain games and a slight discount on the Xbox Live store, it's nothing to go crazy for, and nobody in the audience does.

His final contribution is a non-gameplay trailer for Plants VS Zombies Garden Warfare 2 which is supposedly a quirky, wacky fun game but is being presented by such a sludgy weasel of a man that it's hard to feel persuaded. 

Especially when he doesn't know where the heart is located.

E3 the gaming event then shows documentary footage of the history of Ford racing cars and slowly lowers a big blue sports car onto the stage of this gaming event before introducing a Forza 6 Motorsport trailer with such a romantic soundtrack, I’m questioning if they're parodying themselves. The trailer itself portrays the same game I see every year with possibly the same reused trailer because at this point I couldn't tell what differences or improvements these games ever make.

As if to slap my ungrateful face, the next trailer is for Dark Souls 3, a game I am very much interested in but unfortunately has yet another non-gameplay trailer so the only useful information is a vague release date of "Early 2016" and perhaps some plot clues. Incomprehensibly the world looks in more of a dire state than ever and a character appears from a grave that looks a bit like Artorias, a legendary knight who died in the first game. Don't read too heavily into that last speculation as Dark Soul's almost exclusively armour-clad characters often look very alike.

Instead of having their "highly polished trailer and gameplay montage set to energetic pop song" trope at the start of the conference Microsoft innovatively chooses to place it half way through for their slew of independent games. They're so proud of these titles they give each one a fraction of a second so that even rewinding the damn footage a hundred times I’ve still only gleaned a fistful of info for each one.

"Cuphead", the 1930's visually styled Disney cartoon on acid, gets double the screen time it did last year...So that's a tantalising 6 seconds at the start of the montage. Other titles include "Mean Greens", a shooter involving plastic toy soldiers, "The Flame and The Flood", a stylised stormy boat con-oh it's gone. 

"Phantasmal: City Of Darkness", a generic looking horror shooter that basically nails its own coffin shut with a Wilhelm scream. Then there's "The Solus" a space or sci-fi exploration type th-ah that's gone too. I think I saw something called "Westerado" which looks like a 2D pixelated, retro style cowboy shooter, then there's-nope it's gone, "Outward" looks kind of like Dark Souls bu-wh-nope that's gone too, there's a Goat Simulator sequel, "Below" is your typical tiny person in intimidatingly bleak but atmospheric world. 

Then what looks like a modern version of Desert Strike. Something involving dinosaurs and dragons, I think called ARK and perhaps the only other game I can talk about with more than a goddamn split second’s knowledge from prior research is SuperHot. SuperHot is an FPS where the gimmick is that time only moves when you do, making it more like a puzzle game in some ways but with potential up there with Portal.

SuperHot only really looks good in motion so here's the surprisingly pretty ARK: Survival Evolved.

The next titles get a bit more time and discussion with actual on stage speaking representatives. Apparently all still independent and exclusive to Xbox.
 

To name just a few, Ashen is supposedly a harsh open world filled with player choice and decisions about trust. The trailer shows two faceless people exploring caves, possibly looking for their face. Some skeleton monsters attack them and a big furry antlered sky whale glides through the air. There's a Shadow of the Colossus vibe to the atmosphere and I’d be interested to see more but we don't.
 

Here's a lady with Beyond Eyes, by which I mean a game called that not the speaker on stage has transcended the need for sight as far as I’m aware. This game follows a blind little girl in a world of a children's book art-style where she must discover and traverse the world around her through senses other than sight. It looks charming enough.

A marginally longer look at Cuphead follows, which continues to look promising with tight, refined (and from looks alone, difficult) 2D, co-op shooter gameplay, silky smooth animations coupled with the old-fashioned art style that makes it wonderfully pleasing to look at, and the bizarre, surreal character and level design that could make this a truly unique classic, releasing sometime in 2016.

Or it could be concentrated nightmare fuel...

For some reason the next speaker and developer of Day Z has to stand on an elevated stage to the side. Maybe they ran out of stages with the endless different people that wouldn't stop fucking appearing and disappearing every 5 seconds. Or maybe it's the E3 equivalent of the naughty step after he begins his speech by saying "I want a game that's not a game". 

He continues to confuse the fuck out of everyone with phrases like "peppered with the havens of fortune" and as I only tuned back in at the end of his speech the final words were "It's Destiny." Which I wish he'd just said at the start.

Upon wearily rewinding, turns out he said something about "players governing its destiny" and their game is actually called ION. A Space progress sim possibly involving lots of astronauts and satellites or possibly just a big naked space human in branded packaging. It's abstract enough to rival 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst showing merely conceptual footage to help us understand what the hell it's about. So thanks for that.

Next comes a surprisingly lengthy gameplay demo for Rise of the Tomb Raider full of slipping, sliding, climbing, falling and grunting, much like the first but in a wintry mountainous setting. Visually it looks fantastic in both setting and character animation but as with the first, the distinction between gameplay and cutscene is very unclear. Still fans of the first in this new reboot will likely be completely on-board with this and its 10th November release date coinciding with Fallout 4.

I like to imagine her chunky sidekick is called "FridgeRaider".

The next video is just frankly depressing. A grandiose voiceover and slow meander through a memorial hall for Rare games teases us with something new, just like last year, and ultimately what is revealed is a collection of 30 of Rare's "Greatest hits" games bundled together for a 30th Anniversary thing. Now this isn't in of itself bad and it's leagues above the despicable Conker cop-out shit of last year but Rare just feels like a supermodel's corpse at this point. People keeping dragging it out to remind us of its beauty but that beauty has long since faded and all that's left now is bones, maggots and big gaping holes where its eyes once were. 

Another point, in less metaphorical terms, "10,000 Gamerscore" should not be something you advertise as a feature of your game in big golden bold lettering. It's like advertising your game's credits' scroll or the pause menu. The whole thing reeks of death and desperation but assuming the games are still functional it's a good collection for fans I suppose. Rare Replay releases on the 4th August 2015.

Might as well have been called Rare: Obituary.

But wait! The man from Rare is still on stage. He IS introducing something new. Maybe, just maybe, they'll bring it all back! "A shared world adventure game" What could that mean? The trailer starts and we watch with anticipation. It's exclusive, it's in a jungle. We're hearing a kind of slow pirate shanty, there's a skeleton with a cutlass in it, there's a stone marking of a Kraken. I like this slow story set-up, I wonder what this is? And just as I open my creaky heart door an inch an online player with a big dumb nametag above their head jogs past in a running animation from 2006.

Sea Of Thieves is an MMO that looks like Assassin's Creed Black Flag with more cartoony visuals and less content. It could be okay, it could even be good but the first person, slow build up at the start of the trailer seemed to be promising a very different game, and "Adventure" isn't just a buzzword you can throw in wherever, it's an actual genre. I feel manipulated and betrayed...Again.

Thank you "LauraLoots" for instantly snapping the neck of immersion.

Luckily Jeff Bridges is here to talk about the "Free"-to-play Fable Legends and Virtual Reality. How Windows 10 is in partnership with Valve and Oculus Rift and apparently every Oculus Rift will come with an Xbox One Controller so...Look forward to that I guess.

Following this, not VR but Holograms, with the new Windows HoloLens. A visor that took a fairly mediocre games conference and made me question what fucking era I was even living in. Demonstrating the HoloLens with Minecraft running, two on-stage representatives created a hologram of their Minecraft map, appearing on a table nearby. Not just an image either, real time footage as the other speaker's character can be seen jumping up and down on the hillside.

They go on to demonstrate zooming, scrolling and marking features of the world map using the HoloLens. I'm genuinely baffled as to how it works and I feel like I’ve been in a coma and woke up in the future. If you're interested in Science and Technology at all, I’d recommend you to search out clips of this section of the conference. It's something quite out of this world that I can't really explain with words...Not on my current sleep pattern anyway.

Minecraft? More like Witchcraft.

Now to be more critical of this, whilst it works very well with Minecraft, it's difficult to imagine the interface benefitting every kind of game out there, or even most besides RTS and large scale top-down map screens. VR and Holograms are undeniably exciting, I’m woefully uneducated as to the limitations of this new tech (The HoloLens was apparently announced in January this year.) and I don't want to be a stubborn old boot in the mud about what are frankly amazing technological advances, but in terms of gaming, we've had this frenzied hype before. 

Motion controls for all their promise and occasional success seem to be moving out of gaming now. Can we
be sure that VR and Holograms won't faze in and out the same way?
 

After all that Sci-Fi Future craziness we go back to Gears Of War one being remastered for Xbox One, which gets right on my tits like a rusty steel clamp. I don't dislike The Gears of War games and the first was a great fresh take on shooters that sadly spawned millions of mediocre clones. The problem is that Gears of War hasn't graphically progressed all that much to make a remaster worthwhile. Similarly with game mechanics and engines. 

The more recent generations have had less noticeable and slower advances in technology between iterations. This isn't like taking a 2D game and remaking it in 3D, it just feels kind of pointless to me. Luckily a remake is not all they had to show and a Gears of War Four gameplay demo introduces new protagonists, monsters and possibly a slightly more subdued, horror tone and atmosphere.

Slightly less steroids too.

Sweaty Spencer finally learns to undo his cardigan by the end of the show and yabbers about the future of Xbox and how they've only shown a fraction of what they have, which is a little odd. I don't know why they would hold anything back to be honest but let's not try and get into the mind of Phil Spencer. Overall a mostly strong display from Microsoft, certainly topping last year. With backwards compatibility, the HoloLens and a vast array of indie titles, Nintendo and Sony will need to actually put some effort in to compete with the slowly rebounding Xbox One.