E3 2016 - Nintendo

Nintendo continues to not really conform to the standard E3 conference format with their Nintendo Direct streamed segments with interviews and gameplay demos in Treehouses. Even more unconventionally they're dedicating their entire presence at E3 to a single brand new game. The Legend Of Zelda: Breath In The Wind. This next installment of the popular Legend Of Zelda series aims to break everything that you're used to and bring a completely new kind of Zelda game to the masses.

An introductory gameplay demo with director Eiji Aonuma alongside Bill Trinen and some unimportant Treehouse goons shows that the huge new game world can be approached a variety of different ways and really exposes itself immediately to you like an old man at a bus stop, valuing personal freedom above all else.

A lot of people are already calling this "The Dark Souls of Zelda games" because of the exchangeable armour and clothing, different weapons with their own durability and a ramped up difficulty that should weed out all the filthy casual pissbabies who got on board during Nintendo's ultimately ill-fated motion controls Wii-phase.

Personally I found the most shocking feature to be the voice acting throughout the game. Link will now comment on the scenery and enemies around him and of course, finally interact with characters in the fully voiced cutscenes. The role of Link is played by some guy called Troy Baker but Bill Trinen promises several other far bigger names appearing in famous roles later on in the game.

If you check Sir Patrick Stewart's IMDB page he's currently listed in a role detailed only as "Sacrificial Bearded Butterfly God". Whilst rumours circulate that Liam Neeson, Michael Cera and Megan Fox are also involved likely as Ganon, Tingle and Zelda respectively.

The first gameplay demo comes to a close when Link suffers a seemingly fatal neck wound from a mysterious figure hiding in the shadows but whose silhouette will look eerily familiar to anyone who's played Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. Shigeru Miyamoto leads the next gameplay demo as his translators relay his commentary in both English and Hylian. This would have been a nice little gimmick for the walkthrough had the subtitles not overlapped with the new Rage meter at the bottom of the screen, completely obscuring our view.

In Shiggy's part of the show we see a new enemy type called the "Trident Monkey." who can skewer and spear Link's armour effectively rendering it useless but annoyingly still counting towards your total equip burden. If Link is unarmoured the trident can also rip and ruin his clothing leaving him completely naked. Apparently the Moblins won't even attack you in this state but will instead point and laugh at your pasty emasculated body and genitals. Miyamoto laughs. "This feature comes from my memories of being a boy-scout but only with the power of the Wii U, can I finally see it realised."

To finish. Bill Trinen segues into an amusing skit where Reggie Fils-Aime runs through the Nintendo offices in a Wario costume flinging custard pies at everyone. Eventually Reggie is caught and receives a disciplinary for such a tasteless prank. He is then soaked in gungey white "Mario Mushroom Juice" as punishment.

A still dripping Reggie thanks the online viewers for tuning in and all the important staff who actually matter before a final trailer for Breath In The Wind plays and the conference comes to a close. Overall I think a really disappointing conference for Nintendo. Despite putting all their money into one game and only showing that, this new Legend Of Zelda looks like a great waste of time and I think my only seething hatred was not being able to see the "squad-based online multiplayer" component of the game.

E3 2016 - Ubisoft

If you thought that maybe E3 conferences were getting more sane and sensible over the years, you would be spectacularly wrong. Ubisoft is picking up the slack and catapulting it into orbit against everyone's wishes.

I don't think there are adequate human words to describe what transpires at the opening of this conference. I don't think I will ever be able to forget what I have seen and was woefully unprepared for upon clicking play. The descriptors buzzing around my head range from hallucinogenic, horrifying, unnecessary to CBeebies and downright distasteful.

It is one thing to butcher the Queen classic "Don't Stop Me Now" it is quite another to do it in Giraffe and Lion costumes with butterfly guitars and unsynchronised backing dancers with psychopathic theatre grins.

It's unfair to compare this to an acid trip because they sometimes result in the mercy of a coma.

Were it just this, I might have moved on. Were the circus clowns all still not on stage I might have dismissed it, but amidst this cheese-stuffed twee, this pompous literal song and dance, Aisha Tyler steps out and tries to express sympathies on behalf of Ubisoft for the victims of the Orlando shootings...

Sony's Shawn Layden mentioned this at the start of their conference too but it was respectfully done because there wasn't a fucking lollipop girl and barbershop quartets doing shit cartwheels five seconds before. Both Shawn Layden and Aisha Tyler point out the unsmooth incongruity in mentioning something so serious and terrible and then having to talk about and celebrate the comparatively trivial world of video games.

The difference however is that Sony, had to move on to talking about video games, it's E3 and their press conference. Ubisoft did not have to start their show with that baffling musical number completely unrelated to video games. Sure it's their 30th birthday and a Just Dance hashtag appears but that performance was not the game and even if it were you could have picked something better to open with. If you wanted to focus that much on the 30th birthday celebrations, just don't mention Orlando. Everyone's wearing the badges anyway, that's all Bethesda and Microsoft did, you could have just thought for more than a second about how it would look and avoided...that.

So finally moving on to the now seemingly foreign object of video games and a CG trailer for Ghost Recon: Wildlands plays where I feel myself being dragged back into politics as the Trumptastic new title sees a bunch of American military fighting a corrupt dictatorship in Mexico.

After this trailer the lead designer starts a pretentious talk about Coca leaves whilst irritating banners of "live" tweets from spectators pop up on screen. I already don't like this guy but finishing his talk with "let's go get that intel" in a tone like Barney the fucking dinosaur talking to a bunch of children cements his name on the shithead-list.

If Barney was somehow in charge of a military operation of course...

A gameplay demo for Wildlands starts and the player immediately shoots two guards in the head as his character's dialogue says "let's try to keep it stealthy." before he switches to an AK47 and blasts another guy standing out in the open.

Our generic American grunt character guns down some more guards before diddling on a laptop to "get that intel." Him and his partner need to proceed to "The Stewmaker's" hideout which is quite a distance away. Player man asks "do you have a car?" to which his partner responds "no, something better." as though this is supposed to be an impressive reveal when his small helicopter lands and the force from the roters doesn't even affect the nearby trees.

A third soldier joins the squad and I suddenly realise that all the characters have the exact same voice with the slight exception to the fourth member, who's a black guy. Despite boasting 4 player co-op throughout the entire campaign it's rather meaningless in this demo as we're not shown the players or any splitscreen view to have any idea how many are actual people  Sony's set up showing the actual players in small video windows at the side was more insightful in this regard.

The soldiers find their target, shoot more dudes, a car chase ensues and they escape by helicopter with the characters talking constantly throughout it. The only impressive feature is the amount of context-specific dialogue they seem to have recorded. You can join the wall builders on March 7th 2017.

There's hundreds of games this screenshot could be from.

Another unsettling trailer talks about the rise of crime in the U.S and plays clips from real-life incidents. It turns out this is a mock-trailer for the next South Park game so I guess it doesn't matter, since rampant insensitivity is kind of their thing.

Jason Schrodinger steps out and simultaneously doesn't, followed by ageing Trey Parker and Matt Stone to talk about South Park: The Fractured But Whole. They all sit down on a big sofa to discuss it like old friendly chummy chums.

In the new game the characters are no longer satirising western RPG's and have moved onto Superhero's and Marvel's movies in particular. We see some cutscenes and gameplay but as with Stick Of Truth, you can't really praise the graphics or the writing except in relation to its authenticity to the show. It looks like the show and seems pretty funny like the show so that's all good I guess.

Next up the creative director of The Division appears with Aisha to talk about the new Underground expansion. "We love this world, you love this world and we're going to keep on making it better for you" Well that's pretty presumptuous of you for a start and also you forgot to add "for a price" to the end of that sentence.

You can get free Splinter Cell, Goose Raccoon and Rainbow Six alternate costumes if you're part of "Ubisoft Club" so tough luck there everyone. They then announce another expansion before the first one is even out. After Underground, a snowy one called Survival is coming but no one knows any difference besides the snow because all we're shown is another CG trailer.

A VR game due in autumn called Eagle Flight is demoed. Where you surprisingly enough play as Eagles who can somehow shoot something at each other, presumably either their shit or giant gobs of spit. The teams play a capture the flag match over Paris where the flag is a rabbit.

The game looks fun in a very simplistic Wii Sports kind of way up until the cameras cut back to the players all swivelling their heads around in their Oculus headsets looking like a row of blindfolded hostages trying to break their own necks.

Next comes the smuggest guy of this E3 (which is saying something) to introduce a Star Trek VR game that they even roped some cast members from prior series (and one from the upcoming movie of course) into playing for a trailer. Most of the trailer is showing the players looking dumb in their headsets sitting on chairs because the title itself looks like a PS2 game.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew comes out in Autumn this year. They all claim it's so much fun but the trailer really isn't convincing. Ubisoft brings Levar Burton back out from the trailer to hype up the game more, talking about teamwork and immersion but I'm honestly not feeling it. 

Instead of sitting in a chair and pressing buttons whilst looking at the interior of a spaceship on your TV, Star Trek VR allows you to sit in a chair and press buttons whilst looking at the interior of a spaceship on some goggles strapped to your face.

Make it so...much better than this please.

A cinematic trailer shows story details of For Honor. The Medieval combat game that combines warriors from Europe, Scandinavia and Asia. It seems in the plot, the world is post-apocalyptic and suffered some natural disaster which halted technology and diminished vital resources, bringing about the scenario where Vikings, Knights and Samurai are all fighting each other.

On top of this there seems to be a supernatural element as a Goddess of War called Apollyon orchestrates the conflict from behind the scenes. Initial historical Googles only show an angel from the New Testament Book of Revelation by that name, who commanded an army of locusts. That doesn't seem to fit what we see here so perhaps it's just the developer's own creation.

Unless we're talking metaphors for expendable human life in war and arty farty hohohohoh.

That's way more story than I expected for this game but the surprise is a pleasant one. For Honor's frightening creative director then steps straight out of the game world and onto the stage to give cheesy patronising Braveheart speeches (again) for 90% of everything he says. He actually drops out of this into normal talk briefly so it's clear he's not physically unable and is actually from our current era in time but he's just doing it as poor choice of...presentation I guess.

A live gameplay demo begins for the Viking's campaign in the single player which sounds like Jason Vandenberghe himself did the voiceover just emphasising how unnecessary his dramatic readings are in the actual conference.

Weirdly, there seems to be a very different crowd at this conference to the dickweeds from all the prior shows who would have heckled and screamed their own stupidity aplenty by now in the frequent awkward silences throughout Ubisoft's show.

As for the gameplay itself the combat looks varied, polished, visceral and fun. With combos, sneak attacks, running tackles, throws, drop attacks and unique environmental kills all amongst impressively realised historical settings like a Japanese fortress seen in this demo. Weirdly For Honor releases on Valentine's day 2017 so you can at least satisfy your murder boner if nothing else...

From Geordi La Forge to Geordie La Forced, a northern chap announces a sequel to indie game Grow Home called Grow Up and I can't help wishing he'd take his own advice instead of talking like the worst condescending cringey advertisement. 

Things had settled down into merely annoying for a while there until two bearded chubby men in pink tracksuits strut through the room and reveal a combination of Trials and Blood Dragon inventively called Trials Of The Blood Dragon.

More like Trials of My Fucking Sanity...

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood at this point but the 80's goof and nostalgic charm Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon had, seems to be soured by thoughtless overuse in this new game or at least its tryhard action figure-based trailer.

Going from the least professional thing this conference to the most, film producer Frank Marshall arrives on stage to talk about the Assassin's Creed movie with Aisha. Frank claims it will be faithful to the games and then shows some "never beseen before footage" that you've probably already seen because it's probably everywhere by now so even mentioning it was rather pointless. Let's pray the Assassin's Creed movie does the impossible of becoming a good video game to film adaptation for once and while we're at it, world peace, cures for cancer and chocolate sex for everyone.

An edited gameplay demo for Watchdogs 2 introduces our main character and his allies on a mission to steal information from a corrupt politician or businessman or something. Breaking into his house involves typical behind cover stealth gameplay with a few neat hacking capabilities like remote controlled spy drones and hacking a parked car to start and crash through the building.

That promising lukewarm start is soaked back to cold indifference when the protagonist pulls a gun and starts shooting guys and melee attacking guards twice his age and size, cementing fears that the developers haven't learnt from the first game. Is it so hard to imagine that people might want creative hacking ways of dealing with guards rather than the same cover-shooting mechanics we see in every other everything these days?

I mean that's just straight up an assault rifle. Do you really need bloody assault rifles in your hacking game?

As for the plot and characters, it feels like it's trying too hard to be modern and cool in places but other goofy parts I have to admit to liking, such as your masked ally who uses electronic keyboard symbols where his eyes would be. Maybe the guns are more optional than they seem but right now I'm mainly sceptical of and concerned for Watchdogs 2.

Following this conference's trend for jarring contrasts two old identically dressed businessmen take turns on stage to talk about this supposedly cool, youthful "fuck the system" streetwise game series. Their business drivel ranges from meaningless "we're excited about a Watchdogs movie" to trivial "PS4 owners get Watchdogs 2 DLC a month earlier than anyone else."

That first old man also runs Ubisoft and Yves Guillmot returns on stage to slowly announce a brand new IP in "a new genre" which as usual is a complete lie. "Steep" is an open world sports racing game located in The Alps because the studio making it is situated at the base of the alps and creativity is now just looking out your window and saying "fuck it, do that."

You can snowboard, ski, paraglide or wingsuit down the mountains in solo or multiplayer as well as rewatch replays, wear goofy costumes and share all that stuff with friends...and that's kind of it really. Everything will really depend on how functional and fun the mechanics are because that's basically all there is to the game.

Looks nice though.

An odd finale to the conference but at this point I'm just glad the two hour long shitshow is finally over. Excluding the opening, as hard as that is to do, Ubisoft's conference had too many CG trailers, mostly mediocre gameplay demos and an infuriating, patronising, cringeworthy attitude throughout that made me want to grit my teeth into dust and then grind my gums together until they wore down to the fucking bone.

Aside from Aisha herself, none of the speakers had any rapport with the audience or any clue how to not be insufferable babblebollocks on stage. For Honor was the only title to actually impress me, whilst a couple of other games felt mainly lacking or misguided and the rest of the conference was quite frankly dreck.

E3 2016 - Sony

Already starting with more of a spectacle, a grand orchestra lead by its composer and part-time Dracula stand-in plays from the soundtrack of what we later learn is the new God Of War theme, before leading straight into a live gameplay demo of said game.

I've not played the prior games but the writing here seems exceptionally well thought out with some memorable dialogue lines in this first showing alone. Kratos is still an arsehole but they're taking that personality and going somewhere with it. We see him try to teach his son to hunt and survive in the wilderness. What wilderness this is exactly or where I don't know. I don't know what happened between this and the last game but a significant change has occurred in the game's setting and tone, right down to the core gameplay.

Voiced by Hugh Jacksman.

Kratos and his son hunt a deer through the icy woods with scenery more reminiscent of Skyrim than God Of War whilst the combat seems slower, heavier and more tactical, perhaps taking cues from the Dark Souls series.

It's unclear at points the distinction between gameplay and cutscene, especially when QTE's are surprisingly absent from a game series that used to be full of them. Naturally, greater enemies than deer appear and Kratos must step in to protect his son but what I'm really interested in is the story of this new entry and to see the hard-arsed Kratos mellow slightly in teaching a young apprentice.

Who, as child actors go, is not insufferable either.

After Microsoft's debacle of zoomed out cameras showing empty stages and motionless audiences in the dark it's relieving to have the footage that mainly focuses on the game putting a few smaller video boxes to the side just to prove there's actually someone playing the game in the live demos and to give screen time to the orchestra during others. It's not perfect but it's an improvement.

The God Of War choir starts up again to give an unsettling entrance theme for my favourite slimy businessman Shawn Layden, who I was hoping would come out in rags this year following his gradual mental descent over the years. Alas he is suited but still a bit twitchy and beardy, so there's still hope for my own personal investment in a dark spiral of corporate self-destruction..

Unfortunately rather than let it speak for itself Shawn has to bolster Sony's ego with the line "what a way to start the show." But it is coupled mostly with thanks to the orchestra and fans et cetera rather than self-congratulatory smugness.

Shawn continues to chat rhetoric about the upcoming show and their admittedly very impressive theatre setting. Perhaps I've been swayed by the better opening to the conference or perhaps Shawn is simply a better speaker than Phil Spencer but this is nowhere near as grating as Microsoft's conference.

A dramatic CG trailer plays for a post-apocalyptic game called Days Gone, starring a dishevelled and disillusioned biker. I like to imagine the developers are trying to save this type of protagonist from only being known in Ride To Hell: Retribution.

As long as there's less clothed sex scenes and 8 second music loops, It should do fine...

Pleasingly, this flows straight into another trailer for the long awaited spiritual successor to Shadow Of The Collosus, The Last Guardian. The trailer is mostly story beats and cutscenes but there's some gameplay shown and perhaps more importantly a release date of October 25th 2016 for which the audience uproariously howls for.

Moving, again immediately into a gameplay demo for Horizon Zero Dawn, winner of the most redundant title award, we see the heroine attempt to attack some of the corrupted robot wildlife and salvage their valuable parts.

The setting is still incredibly interesting, as a post-post-apocalypse world where nature has retaken the planet and mechanical remnants of an old world still wander lost like wild animals. The plot seems to hint at finding increasingly ancient robots and likely discovering what exactly befell the world and the gameplay seems solid, with some fun features like a scanner that determines an enemies' exact weakness and the cable-tethering arrows used to trap and restrain targets.

Still hard to believe this is from the people behind Killzone.

Next up comes an intriguing new title featuring an android negotiator which promises a myriad of ways to fail or semi-fail and probably one very difficult way to actually resolve the hostage situation. Oh wait, it's David Cage's new thing? Then I meant it looks like shit and will be a horrible waste of time.

In reluctant honesty though, the premise looks decent despite its creator and hopefully this will break the trend from Cage's other floundering misfires. Making half the characters robots is actually the smartest move you could make for someone who can't write humans. You can order Detroit to Become Human sometime in 2017.

Due to the cameras not being on the bloody screen again, I miss the introductory text to our next title and the video mixer only catches up in time for me to see the word Kitchen. I'll have to try and guess from that alone then.

Cooking Mama's really ramping up the difficulty.

It ultimately turns out to be Resident Evil 7 but by God you wouldn't know it from the footage. The game is now in first person and from what little we see, a guy explores a derelict and disgusting house after receiving a phone call that someone is coming to kill him.

The story remains teasingly unclear and to break format slightly for a moment, I later saw some interviews with the creators that confirmed this is still canon and set in the Resident Evil universe, so it's definitely not a reboot. It is however, an entirely new character we're playing as, their justification for which was that Chris, Jill, Leon et cetera had become almost like superheroes and far too capable to really feel vulnerable playing as them.

I completely agree with this and in trying to bring back the horror emphasis to Resident Evil whilst not abandoning its other features, this huge new direction makes a lot of sense for what they're trying to achieve, even if it is now unrecognisable amongst the hundreds of first person horror games in creepy houses.

After three conferences now and perhaps because of Sony's sophisticated venue I'd foolishly hoped the audience would be better behaved than feral baboons but this tension building, quiet horror game trailer was pretty much ruined by shiteating dickless heckler twats shouting out like the guy in secondary school always trying to be funny.

I'll defend gamers against a lot of unfair criticism but there's no denying at least the people at this year's E3, include some truly pathetic immature wankholes who I wish had been kicked out for not knowing how to shut the fuck up and not ruin an event for everyone else. Sorry, personal soapbox rant there...Moving on...

Five new trailers in a row is an excellent flow for the conference and Shawn returns briefly to reconfirm RE7's release date of January 24th 2017 and reveal it will be completely compatible with VR (probably only due to the first person perspective).

Naturally after this he announces that Playstation VR (apparently no longer called Morpheus) will release October 13th 2016 at the price of $399 USD, the same price as Microsoft's Project Scorpio with a 2TB hard drive, for reference. He promises 50 compatible games, old and new by the end of the year and goes on to premier an exclusive new game built specifically for PSVR.

Farpoint is a Sci-Fi FPS that appears to be about discovering hostile life on an alien planet. It will probably only become more difficult to distinguish gameplay from cutscene or CG with VR now but I believe this was a purely cinematic trailer.

Next up comes a natural addition to the VR roster with Star Wars Battlefront: X-Wing VR Mission. First person piloting in the ever-popular Star Wars space battles that the developers ingeniously left out of the main game.

There's even a new Rocksteady developed Batman Arkham VR game, coming October 2016 but with no further details than a cryptic trailer voiced by Mark Hamill's Joker talking about masks. I can't really see how this one will work to be honest but I hope you can at any point just take the headset off and that translates as removing the cowl mid-conversation with Commissioner Gordon.

Stepping out of VR now, Final Fantasy 15 shows a slightly more impressive trailer than the lacklustre gameplay demo at Microsoft's conference, but then stumbling back into VR we're introduced to Final Fantasy XV VR Experience which I really hope is a working title. Now you can play the game in first person armed only with a piddly little pistol to doot at monsters from a distance which I think is really the underlying pull that everyone comes to the Final Fantasy games for.

While I'm willing to bet Final Fantasy Dance Dance Revolution would be better received, the developers themselves have enough faith to even show one of your boyband troupe wearing the dumb VR headset and pissing around with it on like it's a pair of designer sunglasses.

Beep boop, you're a twat.

Everyone really should be trying to avoid showing these headsets in action because no one has yet solved the problem of how to not look like an extraordinarily hollow-headed toolbox while using VR and it certainly doesn't help sell your game with the opportunity to look like an overenthusiastic, techno-birdwatcher.

It's unclear if this is a mode in the main game or a stand-alone spin off but judging purely on the apparent quality, I would hope it's just the former. Also you can "play as Prompto" whatever that means.

Next up is a fast-paced Sci-Fi military FPS with seamless transitions between fighting in person and piloting spaceships. The amount of detail alone makes it feel very authentic and immersive and the playing with gravity combined with a grappling hook gadget looks like maneuvering in space is both fun and easy. I wonder what this game even is-What?! This is Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare?

I feel like it isn't being paid the respects it deserves...

Apparently so, which is odd because if the internet is to be believed (which it's not) COD: IW is supposed to be the biggest train wreck since shortly after the invention of the first train. I don't actually have any allegiance to either COD or the Battlefield series and haven't even played most of the games but for the monumental dislikes COD: IW's trailer got and the more understandable outrage at the Modern Warfare Remaster being exclusive to purchasing Infinite Warfare, the actual gameplay of Infinity Ward's latest looks exciting, polished and fun.

Maybe it's just the fanboy minorities who lose their tiny minds over these things but from the display shown at Sony's E3 conference and the buzz surrounding Battlefield 1, both games could be fantastic and offer opposite ends of a similar taste. I haven't gotten round to watching actual gameplay of Battlefield 1 because the overhyped stream wasn't in EA's conference but I've wanted a WW1 game for a long time so hopefully both of these series can nail their respective new directions.

Perhaps unwisely the aforementioned controversially exclusive Modern Warfare Remastered gets a brief trailer after Infinite Warfare's finishes but the crowd at least certainly has no time to reflect on this. The stage's curtain finally lifts to reveal a nostalgic backdrop and the orchestra begins a familiar tune. Shawn even returns with his own shadow being replaced by the famous character's...Not actually sure how they did that.

I'm guessing some kind of occult ritual involving a PS1 and a frightened Marsupial.

Shawn announces that the original Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2 and Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped will all be remastered for the PS4. The audience as you can imagine goes absolutely bed-wettingly bonkers.

Strangely a rather less exciting announcement is the one that gets a trailer. Upcoming wallet-gobbler Skylanders: Imaginators will include Crash Bandicoot as a playable character and I can't decide if he looks objectively too creepy in modern-day graphics or if they've somehow gotten away with it.

But then I guess he's always looked kinda creepy...

Andrew Mouse walks on stage to a very triumphant brass section but his implied importance is rather quashed as some cheeky smartarse in the editing room puts his introductory subtitle name as "Andy House." I dunno, maybe he wanted it like that, perhaps he's trying to seem more hip and relateable for the kids. Just seems odd that it didn't match what was actually said over the speakers. It'd be like introducing Shigeru Miyamoto and his title card said "The Shigster" or "Shiggy Shizzle Me I Am Motormizzle" ...Okay now I feel old.

Speaking of being hip, his next introduction seems to confirm that Hideo Kojima has become the game industry's "Mr Hot Shit" as he gets a deific light-up walkway down the stage and entrance music straight from Hans Zimmer's post-it notes.

Looks a bit rubbish when you screenshot it...

I like Kojima and his crazy ideas as much as the next guy but allow me to risk fatally overdosing on cynicism here. P.T was great but would Kojima be anywhere near as famous right now had he not been so vitriolically fired and erased from Konami? Konami were undoubtedly monstrously shameful bastards about that whole thing but ironically, losing that job may have ended up being the best thing to happen to Kojima's career since Metal Gear Solid 3.

Industry reflections aside, he seems very happy with his reception as he introduces his new game Death Stranding. Immediately obvious as a Kojima production from the William Blake quote and funky soundtrack, we see a floor littered with dead crabs leading up to a naked Norman Reedus handcuffed to a baby whilst handprints from a ghost made of oil touch up everything before Reedus looks up with a crucifix scar on his stomach to see what looks like a dried up sea, destroyed by oil...

...What you expect me to comment on that? I don't know what the fuck he's smoking either but I suppose that's exactly what everyone wants from a Kojima production so welcome back Hideo and hello naked oily crying Norman Reedus...There's a phrase I never expected to say. Not out loud anyway...

What's bigger than Kojima right now? Well Marvel movies are probably one of the few things so the following trailer shows us an as yet untitled Spiderman game with (I think) a few slithers of gameplay amidst the CG and cutscenes. A highlight being, Spidey hopping across tables in an office before bursting out of a glass window hinting at seamless transitions between interior and exterior settings.

Combat appears to attempt what you'd hope. Stringing up bad guys and swinging things in the environment to whack them with. One of these things in the trailer appears to be (or at least the size of) a car, which might be a bit much for random street thugs but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that Peter Parker hasn't gone full Man Of Steel on us.

Of course the most important thing is the swinging mechanics and I can only hope that Jamie Fristrom, the man behind Spiderman 2's legendary swinging mechanics is on-board or at least that the current team have learnt from his achievements.

Also unclear if this ties into the upcoming "Homecoming" movie. New suit suggests maybe no?

Shawn returns on stage to another dramatic tune, this time sounding rather unholy from the orchestra. If he has to come out again, I swear it's just going to be the Imperial March. He thanks everyone and talks about the heart of video games being gameplay before finishing off the conference with a live demo of the biker's post apocalypse game we saw earlier, Days Gone.

The protagonist searches an abandoned factory for someone called 2-Dog, MacGyvering weapon accessories from old cars but ultimately leaving Mr. Dog to die when a zombie horde becomes aware of them. So yeah it's zombies again and if you're tired of that I doubt this game will be so good as to rekindle your passion but the sheer numbers of the hordes is very impressive, I think even topping Dead Rising and there's hints at other neat features like the floorboards buckling under the weight of an advancing horde.

That guy's not even part of it, he's just trying to scooch past to go down the shops.

Not much else to go on with this title and arguably a bit of a mediocre closer to the show but overall a very strong conference from Sony I feel.The main strength, as it always will and should be, is focusing on the games and cutting out the business bullshit which Playstation did almost as much as they possibly could.

I imagine some people were hoping for gameplay of the Final Fantasy 7 remaster which was a no-show but some genuinely exciting and stunning titles like God Of War and...Call of Duty (I never thought I'd be saying that) make up for it. Fair play Sony, jolly good show.

Now get Shawn hooked on cocaine already so I can fulfill my insane businessman fantasy.