E3 2018 - Microsoft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh boy! Please let me die."

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

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

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

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

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

Sea of Thieves continues to exist.

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

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

I liked when things were finished before we bought them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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