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.