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.