With E3 slowly winding down and coming to a close I wanted to join the hundreds of people expressing their feelings on the turn out this year. I know quite a few of my fellow gamer-bloggers have been live-blogging E3 this year. I appreciate their stamina and insight, particularly because it allowed me to skip a lot of it due to other conflicts. If you want a really good exploration of a lot of the showcases I highly recommend Adventure Rules. His posts made me laugh and were pretty good at capturing the feel of the presentations.
Bethesda: Let’s start with one I didn’t watch. Thanks to Ian, my little brother, and my brother-in-law I got a pretty good idea of what happened. It made me feel very lucky that I didn’t stay up for it… Nothing was announced that sparked my interest, including Skyrim for Switch, because, frankly, that guy stealing Link’s stuff was just weird to me.
Microsoft: I don’t own an Xbox and I probably won’t ever own an Xbox. But their overwhelming focus on something that’ll be difficult for people to afford utilizing technology hardly anyone can afford painted them into a serious corner. So what if your console has 4K resolution? Are you going to drop $500.00 on a new console only to play it on your TV that’s still 1080P? In order for this truly to work you’ve got to spend the thousands on a new TV, and then buy the console, and then buy only the games that have 4K capability! Am I impressed with the technology they presented? Of course! It’s a huge leap forward. But do I honestly think it’s going to work out for them? I think that’s an obvious no… At least not right now.
Ubisoft: I’m not an Assassin’s Creed fan. I know the stories are pretty interesting, in general, but I think the gameplay is pretty boring. I didn’t even like Black Flag despite the fact that you’re a pirate and pirate’s were in that year. But an ancient Egyptian storyline has so much potential! I think I’ll still feel the same way about the gameplay and, frankly, even with the coolest concepts Ubisoft hasn’t delivered on a storyline I care about. But then there’s Mario + Rabbids. It looked like a mixture of straight-up weird and cool. I couldn’t tell what my feelings were on this one. At first I pushed back, thinking it was something I would never play. But the more I see of it, the more willing I am to give it a chance. It’s a Mario game, after all.
EA: Confession time: I love Star Wars. When I went to my very first Comic Con and saw Dave Prowse I started crying because I was so overwhelmed. He thought that was pretty cool and invited me and my family to dinner with him and Peter Mayhew. Definitely worked out in my favor. So when I see a newer and much, much better Battlefront coming, I get excited. Nothing else really stood out, but Star Wars is always worth it for me.
PlayStation: Every year my brother-in-law throws a PlayStation party where we gamers come together and watch the showcase. This year we even had a game. Each of us wrote down a list of games we thought they’d present and there was a point system and everything. I don’t always play something other than Nintendo, but when I do, I play PlayStation (keep gaming, my friends), so I was pretty interested in what they’d be showing. However, since I don’t play it very often, PlayStation would have to show something incredible to get me excited… But that didn’t happen. I didn’t see anything that blew me away. Even the new Uncharted, a series I actually love, didn’t appeal because I really don’t like Chloe! What surprised me, though, was how little the people around me cared. All the games we had guessed and games we were excited for weren’t discussed and the gameplay didn’t wow. Though I admit, the zombear was pretty awesome. Luckily they closed with Spider-man, which has some serious potential for making the Arkham fanbase happy.
Nintendo: Now for the cream! I don’t know what I was expecting from this but it wasn’t what we got. Other than the weird voice-over for Xenoblade 2 (seriously, what was that?), they blew me away with their animation, titles, color, and excitement. A new Pokemon RPG, a new Metroid, the Breath of the Wild DLC, a new Kirby, an amazing-looking Yoshi, followed up with Super Mario Odyssey. It was like eye candy and happiness had a baby. I’m so excited for nearly every single thing they announced and now I’m anxious for it all to get released! I’m so excited for these games it feels like I’m a kid again.
So who, in my opinion, “won” E3? I think that’s not really a fair question. Everyone has different tastes, opinions, and ideas about what they want from their gaming experience. I am a pretty exclusive Nintendo gamer so Microsoft (obviously) didn’t appeal to me and, while I enjoy PlayStation games and the stories they tell I wasn’t wowed by anything they brought to the table this year. So it’s pretty fair to say Nintendo, with their colors, graphics, lack of mindless intro’s, and announcements of some new heavy hitters was my absolute favorite. But it was last year, too, when the only thing they talked about was Breath of the Wild. I think, based on preferences determined by a quick poll at my laboratory of all the serious gamers there, everyone got pretty excited about something someone was releasing. Which means that, to me, E3 itself was the winner, bringing another year of excellent games to excellent platforms that appeal to a wide audience of gamers.
So what did you guys think? Any games you’re super excited to play?
Sheikah Plate 