Allow me to apologize, on the behalf of all game developers, for the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo.
I donât have time to read every piece of periodical published on the subject. The few articles I have scanned, however, point to a general consensus that this yearâs E3 was a sort of bloodbath Roman Carnival of depraved screaming, screeching, and shrieking
I find this assessment not immediately off the mark. The loudest moment of E3 2012âlouder than the dubstep on the show floor, louder than the hip-hop at the NOS booth outside, louder even than the amplifier of the microphone-wielding man spouting The Word of Jesus in direct competition with the hip-hop at the NOS boothâwere, yes, the orgasmic shrieks of press-conference attendees viewing moving imagery of a virtual bodybuilder lobotomizing an elephant with a jagged dagger.
A man held a sign high outside E3 for all days of the show: âALL HAVE SINNEDâ, it said, and then some Bible verse coordinates. Say what you will about the Bibleâthis man was on to something. His printed words chilled, and not only because weâre all a little guilty about something. This man appeared to us during a week fraught with images of simulated violence, in a crucible of humanity wherein âto decapitate with a shotgun blastâ inches day by day toward worthiness of its own single-syllable verb. We are not murderers; we arenât even âvirtualâ murderers, since that distinction means nothing. We are not exactly âchampionsâ of violence, either, unless we endeavor to destroy every game not about headshots and neckshots and bleed-outs.
https://lastchance.cc/these-e3-attendees-look-a-little-out-of-place-5916487%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Many colleaguesâjournalists and game developers alikeâwho I spoke to at this yearâs E3 seemed bereft of their ancient wonder regarding electronic entertainment. As my friend Brandon Sheffield said, âI miss when games werenât a multi-billion-dollar industryâ. That just about sums up the way everyone I talked to in Los Angeles last week felt about this whole video game thing.
Now that games are a multi-billion-dollar industry, theyâve gotten ahead of themselves. It feels to me that the games industryâs growing pains are going to outlast its relaxing times, as here we are with another year packed full of virtual murder, now more visceral and grotesque than ever.
THE NUN-GARROTE HEARD ROUND THE WORLD
Square-Enix kicked off the gaming communityâs disillusioned response to this yearâs E3 with a quick and brutal pre-show teaser trailer for Hitman: Absolution
As we all know, âcolon, noun ending in âion'â is game publisher code language for âit would probably hurt sales if we let people know how many games weâve made in this series before this oneâ.
In some cases, they want you to think theyâve made fewer entries; in others, they want you to think theyâve made more.
Hitman has always been a series which prides itself in semi-real violence. You play the role of a super-tough guy who is bald and has a barcode tattooed on the back of his head.
The outcry regarding this trailer was monumental, and thus probably exactly what the publisher wanted. The consensus was that here was proof games are horrible schlock and can never be art if this sort of thing keeps up.
Many sectors despised the trailer on sight for its portrayal of women.
Hereâs how women are portrayed in the new Hitman trailer: all women in the trailer are also nuns who are riding a school bus. They step out of the bus and shuffle toward the sleazy motel inside of which Agent 47 is cleaning and dressing wounds from an unseen battle.
The nuns throw off their habits. Under those robes, the nuns are all wearing fishnet stockings and outfits resembling the collision between a bikini and a blender. One of the nuns produces a rocket launcher from . . . somewhere.
Around here is where Jerry âTychoâ Holkins of Penny Arcade decided that, âonce a nun produces an RPG from her habit, we have passed through a kind of âveilâ critically speakingâ. I agree with many of the points Holkins makes, though for me, the trailer transformed into something ignorable several seconds earlier, with the image of a bandage over Agent 47âs signature barcode tattoo.
The bandage is oriented horizontally. We can see it soaking up blood. We recognize that someoneâprobably Agent 47 himselfâhas slashed the barcode horizontally with a sharp object.
Letâs pretend weâve never played a Hitman gameâfor many of you, this wonât be a difficult exercise (epic burn (actually Iâm not sure who I just burned)). So we have no idea what the barcode is for. Weâll presume, because someone has cut it with a blade, that itâs for identification purposes, and the bearer of the tattoo no longer wants his previous identifiers to identify him.
So in an instant we decide that this man took the blade to his own tattoo.
Except he cut it horizontallyâslashing through each bar of the code.
Anyone whoâs worked at a supermarket for more than a day realizes that in order to render a barcode unreadable, you must violate it with a single vertical mark which extends from a hair above the barcode to a hair below it.
So here we have deduced that someone producing the Hitman: Absolution trailer had possibly, in another life, been fired from a supermarket after less than a dayâs work.
So this phantom writerâs ignorance of the larger points of supermarket standards renders the storyâs protagonist something of a stupid-person.
What happens after this expensive computer-animated wound-dressing with a gaping logic hole is thus painted the color of idiotic. Our titular Hitmanâs credibility is thus brained with a bowling pin, flopping like a fish on the floor; immediately I consider anyone who falls to this âprofessionalâ assassin lacking the common sense to operate a cash register to be dumber than dumb.
To help this impression along, the Battle Nuns attempting to assassinate Agent 47 are complete morons. Iâm sure the groaning critics were most upset with the gruesome nature of the manner in which Agent 47 kills his targets; Iâd like everyone to take a step back and look at just how stupid his targets were. Letâs not forget to be offended by that, as well.
Theyâre dressed as nuns and riding a bus.
Why were they dressed like nuns?
Are they dressed like nuns so as to appear inconspicuous to the bus driver?
Do bus drivers, as a rule, never chat up nuns?
How not-confident in their skills of spying and assassinating were these nuns, that they had to adopt âinconspicuousâ disguises in order to avoid having a simple lowly bus driver who probably didnât even finish elementary school blow their cover?
Why donât they have their own bus?
If it is their own bus, why are they disguised on their own bus? Why canât they dress like normal women?
If the nun disguise is intended to maintain an inconspicuous aura while these females travel in a large group, why do they take the habits off immediately after exiting the bus?
Seriously, isnât the inconspicuous disguise more important when their full bodies are exposed? What eagle-eyed schoolchild is peering from a rooftop with binoculars into the windows of a passing bus, the FBIâs number dialed, finger hovering over the âsendâ key, deciding at last to âWait â itâs just a group of nunsâ?
Now the nuns throw off their clothes, and theyâre all sexy and breasty. They walk toward the motel in a stupidly showoffy âVâ formation, point a rocket launcher, and let one rip.
Okayânow our hero appears and kills every one of them. We get to see their skin warp, their eyeballs widen, their boobs flop, their tongues loll, exit-wound bullet-holes appear in their foreheads as they go limp, spurt blood, fall over, and die.
Meanwhile, some Really Sweet Rain Effects and Really Sweet Fire Effects dance about, the heartbeat of a new generation of computer graphics.
Elsewhere, in the real world: So thereâs some guy in this roomâitâs a really big room. In this room is a big, elliptical table. I bet this guy has a pound of B-vitamins in his bloodstream. Heâs talking about how âGrindhouseâ was popular a couple of years ago, so letâs go with that aesthetic. Heâs got a slideshow, and one of the slides is the scene from âKill Billâ where a group of assassins converges on a small church and blows it away with machine guns.
âKill Billâ, however, is an intelligent, self-aware thing, put together without even a cursory glance at Whatâs Hot With The Kids. âKill Billââs iPhone address book doesnât have a single focus groupâs contact information in it. Itâsâlike it or notâa work of some genuine human beingâs taste, an intelligently-assembled collage of copies of Things An Existing Person Genuinely Likes.
Hitman: Absolution isnât this. Itâs a copy of copies of copies. Itâs turtles half of the way down, and copies of turtles the rest of the way down.
Now, here I am, not being fair: weâre judging a book by its cover. Weâre judging a nun by her face. Letâs talk about the game design: a quick tour on the E3 show floor left me with the impression that Hitman: Absolution is a neat little game with some nice ideas. Square-Enix is a large corporation, rich with the money of teenagers who love cartoon hair and J-pop, and so they are willing to share some of this money by salarying some talented people at the tops of the fields of computer graphics, software engineering, and game design.
Hitman: Absolution is a Nice-Enough Video Game.
Just because the marketing is choppy, sleazy, and ugly doesnât mean that everyone working on the game is a jerk. In fact, many of the people working on the game are probably fantastic human beings.
For example, I often justify my work like so: A dollar a housewife spends on FarmVille items is a dollar her child doesnât spend on high-fructose corn syrup.
Behind me in line for the bathroom at the Microsoft conference was a kid who must have been nineteen. He asked me if I knew where âthe Ubisoft thingâ was, and I said I think itâs downtown, and then he asked me if I thought it was âgonna be sweetâ. I think he might have been one of the screaming people.
Iâm sure many people on the Hitman: Absolution development team tell themselves something similar when they go to bed at night. âAt least Iâm not stationed at a 7-Eleven dumpster, handing packs of cigarettes to preschoolersâ, et cetera. Stabbing a virtual nun in the back of the skull is rancid and stupid, and though it will give you a metaphorical cancer, it sure as heck wonât give you or your children a literal cancer.
So Hitman: Absolution isnât âCitizen Kaneâ. Heck, itâs not even âThe Third Manâ. Itâs just some nonsense about a bald guy gutting professional assassins who probably couldnât even tie their shoes. That doesnât mean it doesnât have some snap and pep to its craft.
Look: no one gets into game design not wanting to make games like Braid or Journey. Everyone whoâs ever owned a pack of Crayons and Super Mario Bros. wants to make a game just like Journey. Itâs justâitâs just, itâs like this, man: if I can play the bass and my friend can play the guitar, we canât have a band unless we have a drummer. And if our drummer sucks, even if my friend is a genius at the guitar, our band sucks. Itâs a miracle that groups of people like Thatgamecompany find one another. The rest of us get to sit in meeting rooms watching an Electronic Arts producer walk us through the âVertical Sliceâ of Dead Space, commenting on how many times and in how many ways the game tells the player to shoot the aliensâ limbs: âThis is crucialâ, he keeps saying. Then, a couple years later, we might be rewriting formulas and applying calculus to a spreadsheet to make sure items in a game are unfairly priced, though not too unfairly priced.
Some of us just arenât cool enough or hot enough to make games entirely by ourselves. Some of us try, and fail, and exit the experience with Job Skills, and maybe by then weâre pretty tired and hungry and in need of health insurance.
So here we are, in a city where sex sells, and death sells, and sex and death sell incredibly well together.
MORE DEATH THAN SEX
More death than sex: at this yearâs E3 I saw a bald virtual bodybuilder lobotomize an elephant man in God of War: Ascension, I saw a bald virtual assassin garotte a faux nun; I saw an elite military sniper decapitate a man through a truck. I heard press conference attendees shriek as though their hair were on fire when a haggard survivor of an apocalyptic event performed shotgun-assisted face-removal surgery to a cowering psycho-bandit in The Last of Us. When skinny little Lara Croftâs body slammed again and again into rocks and trees and cliffs and boulders in a live demonstration of Tomb Raider, the scream-bellows approached Just-Won-The-High-School-Football-Game intensity, their sonic texture identical to a race of alien lion-peopleâs word for âHeck yeah broâ.
âWho the heck is screaming at all these things?â a journalist friend asked me.
Lucky for him, I had an answer: âBehind me in line for the bathroom at the Microsoft conference was a kid who must have been nineteen. He asked me if I knew where âthe Ubisoft thingâ was, and I said I think itâs downtown, and then he asked me if I thought it was âgonna be sweetâ. I think he might have been one of the screaming people.â
So hereâs where I realized that I was literally fourteen years old when Mortal Kombat came out. I was The Target Audience. Entertainment Softwareâs most trusted thriving point is âdisruptionâ: if the thing is new, the thing is successful. Itâs that simple. Mortal Kombat was exciting because its realistic digitized combatants gushed blood in cartoonish volumes. Every collision of grainy real-like fist on grainy real-like face resulted in a snap-freeze and frictive shake of the screen. Here was a game with cheap, showy grotesqueryâand also with a nuanced parade of friction. The blood was The Big Stepâthe one that got the kidsâ arcade moneyâand the friction was The Little Step, a group of game designers and developers acting on their suspicion that they could make These Things as well as or better than the guys they admired.
A little quick math tells me that the chorus of screamers at this yearâs E3 press conferences were roughly four years old when Mortal Kombat appeared. To them, Mortal Kombat wasnât ânewââit was ânormalâ. It was not the expectation-shattererâit was the expectation itself.
When I was the age they were when they first played Mortal Kombat, I was still playing Grand Prix on the Atari 2600.
Have mainstream games innovated much since the time of Mortal Kombat? Itâd be flame-baiting to say they havenât. So I wonât say that. Theyâve evolved a whole lot: itâs just that they could use a whole lot more.
Meanwhile, the techniques by which developers innovate have remained constant: We take Big Steps, like more violence, more grotesquely, bigger cut-scenes, more polygons, more gore, more particle effects, more muscles, balder protagonists, lusher environments, Better Water Effects, neckshots which are more satisfying than headshots. Then we take Small Steps, such as refining the micro-length of a good strong-melee-attack freeze-frame, developing more concise, thoughtful, bold new geometrical level design archetypes (carrying the Pac-Man torch, we call it (actually we donât)), or giving the protagonists of meathead shootfest brodowns wives who are in danger (âdeeper dramaâ).
So, that ââCitizen Kaneâ of gamesâ is probably still a ways off. Letâs not worry about it just yet. As Jerry Holkins said, in some different words, every time Agent 47 garrotes a nun, an indie darling developer does not literally have a stroke. Bad Art is not antimatter. As any personal trainer will tell you, you can decrease your body fat percentage without burning fat! How do you do thisâalchemy? No, you do it by increasing your muscle mass. In other wordsâin the words of Jerry âTychoâ Holkins: âMore art is always the answerâ.
So we wonât have a âCitizen Kaneâ anytime soon, though heyâmaybe, just maybe, if weâre lucky, weâll get a âThe Dark Knightâ of videogames: something made by well-meaning, diligent fanboys of the lore of the medium, solid all around, bursting with concepts, confident in execution, offering something for everyone in the audience.
Artlessness be darned, the myriad techniques of game development have grown up, and are continuing to grow up. The Triple-A sphere squeezes out big ideas by the steaming handful, and the indies do so, too. Little ideas are there in the woodwork all the while. Weâve got big ideas flying at us from all directions, and whether we stop to process it or not, whether weâre young enough to enjoy press conferences or not, even when a glance reveals only graphic violence and dude-shooter games, on the most molecular level of the craft, Video Games Are Getting Undeniably More Interesting, and theyâll keep getting more interesting.
MY GAMES OF THE SHOW: THE LAST OF US and NINTENDO LAND
This yearâs E3 show-owner might have been The Last of Us, or it might have been Nintendo Land. Both of these are completely different things from their most nuclear levels, though both of them come from the same place: the memory of the moment we realized video games were awesome, and, in a time older than this one, the moment we realized fun was great.
The Last of Us seems to be an answer to a few criticisms of Naughty Dogâs own Uncharted series: that the wise-cracking treasure-hunting T-shirt-wearing protagonist is also coincidentally a mass murderer. The Last of Us is swollen heavy with context, in that each combat skirmish sees the heroes facing psychopaths resembling the sort of person weâd imagine the typical person would become if theyâd survive a cataclysm that claims 98% of life on earth. These are desperate, terrified, terrifying people. The emotional impact of each firefight is dreadful, slow, and fascinating. The demonstrations I saw were of a game whose every situation is so thoughtfully designed that I wanted to figuratively put my hands on my hips and say âI told you soâ: I told people, for years, since before Ken Levine was preaching about âthe world is the best narratorâ, that you can tell powerful stories in games using just the visual language of level-design situations. This is something Out of this World sure as heck knew, and The Last of Us seems to know it as well. Itâs pregnant with twin children: story and mechanics. This is the exact sort of video game I want to play.
This yearâs E3 show-owner might have been The Last of Us, or it might have been Nintendo Land. Both of these are completely different things from their most nuclear levels, though both of them come from the same place: the memory of the moment we realized video games were awesome, and, in a time older than this one, the moment we realized fun was great.
Nintendo Land, on the other hand, is as un-pregnant a game as you can possibly make. Iâm fine with that. I donât mind games that arenât pregnant.
Nintendo Land is a virtual theme park. Itâs like Disneyland, except with Nintendo. Its rides are based on Nintendo franchises. And theyâre not ridesâtheyâre video games. Remember Wii Sports? Of course you donâtâthat was 2006. Well, Wii Sports (Iâve just checked Wikipedia) seems to be some sort of game where you flailed your arms and stuff happened. It was a collection of games based loosely on sports, with no context connecting them. You just chose one, and played it.
Well, Nintendo Land has some context. You walk around a park. Itâs all very shinyâitâs just too magical to actually be real, and thatâs just the way I like it.
I wish I could honeymoon in Nintendo Land
Nintendo Land is âWorld of iPhone Games: With Friends: On Your Television: Starring Nintendoâ. And I mean that in the nicest way.
Every one of the Nintendo Land mini-games Nintendo showed on the convention floor were sparkling in their simplicity. They all reminded me just enough of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for the Nintendo Gamecube. To play that game, I needed to convince three friends to buy expensive cables to connect their Gameboy Advances to the Gamecube. Then I had to get them all in the same room at the same time. It was brutally difficult, to a point where actually playing through the game was simple in comparison.
I feel like Four Swords Adventures was a shining beacon of game design that failed to become the entirety of the mainstream only because the cost of entry was so high. Iâve been vaguely convinced for years now that Nintendoâs kept a whole galaxy of similar game design concepts on the shelf since then, waiting for a time where it was possible to hit it out of the park. And now, with smartphones and tablets tiptoeing into game console manufacturersâ territory, the perfect opportunity exists to hammer out dozens of these ideas. So, here are the Nintendo Land minigames, each of them the sort of game my friends and I would design while sitting around at a pizza place at just before midnight on a Saturday. Each one of these games is a reason in itself to throw a party. Each one is a spark that ignites the imagination part of the brain. Each of them is Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort to the twenty-fifth power. Itâs like a higher-up went to the Mario Party team and said to pick just 12 mini-games and spend a whole year on each one. I want to play all of these games. I want to eat them.
I couldnât care less about Batman on the Wii U. I couldnât care less about a game where you shoot zombies in the face. I want to control obstacles in a Donkey Kong mine-cart scenario as my friends scream like hyenas on helium.
So thatâs Nintendo: I have always loved and hated them. I love them because they are nearly always Small Steps, though this is sometimes frustrating because they could be a bit more radical with, say, games like Zelda. And when they do Something Bigâwho the heck knows whatâs going through their heads? A tablet inside the game controller? Thatâs not . . . that big of an idea, is it? Tweeted a games journalist after the Wii U controller reveal last year: âThis means they can make a Four Swords sequel.â Of course it does, I agreed: though is that enough?
Then thereâs Nintendo Land, and I think, âI guess Nintendo is pretty coolâ.
Itâs obvious that Nintendo went to third parties, and asked, âHey, can you make something neat for our Wii U thing?â And the developers sort of scoffed: if the Wii U is at least equal in power to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, then a straight port of a successful game is easy enough. What are they going to add to the game, and how? They have to use that big controller. Theyâre not just going to make a new game from scratch specifically for that controllerâthen they couldnât port it easily to the other consoles. So we get remote-controlled first-person Batarangs shoehorned into Batman.
Nintendo is going to have to try hardâwith Nintendo Landâto teach developers why the Wii U is a great idea. And hereâs me getting a little sentimental: maybe theyâll pull it off. Maybe people are really going to love this thing. Wouldnât that be fantastic? Maybe weâll have a whole wave of friendly games where fun is at the core.
Either way, The Last of Us is endlessly interesting. Here in 2012, we see evidence that Uncharted has finally infected big-time triple-A studios. The new Tomb Raider obviously owes a thing or two-dozen to Uncharted. Heck, itâs almost like Uncharted Turbo Hyperfighting. And as the Uncharted series grew and continued, it learned little tricks from Gears of War, et cetera, et cetera: the craft of designing and polishing situations is yet evolving, and a game like The Last of Us points to a healthy coagulation of concept and execution. Weâre almost at that point where the road map present at the start of a triple-A project is going to be so god darn clear and concise that we wonât need to market our games with elephant lobotomies or nun-tracheotomies.
Also, hopefully, in five more years or so, Kim Swift, a game designer behind Portal and this E3âs mind-blower Quantum Conundrum, will have a team 10 times the size of her current team, so sheâll be able to direct 10 things a year. Thatâd go a long way toward fixing a couple of things.
Until then, a metaphor for getting older: this year marked the 10th anniversary of my first coming to E3. I canât say I enjoyed it. Maybe Iâll enjoy it more next year. Two years ago, my friend Bob and I stormed into E3 and drank five free cans of NOS energy drink in less than two hours. My blood sugar plummeted at terminal velocity. I threw up a couple times. I had to drink a Mexican Coca-Cola to regain my metabolism. Since then, NOS has been a huge joke among my friends and I. âCanât wait for E3 this year,â weâll say. âHow else are we going to get to drink NOS?â Of course, they sell NOS in the convenient stores, though weâd never buy it. So last year I drank some NOS, and laughed about it, and played some games, and laughed about them. This year, I drank two cans of NOS on the first day, groaned a couple of times, drank two liters of water, and didnât approach the NOS booth for the rest of the show. One time, while looking in its direction, I asked my friend: âWhy canât it be a Coca-Cola booth?â I guess this means Iâm finally an adult.
IN WHICH I SAY NICE STUFF ABOUT SOME OTHER GAMES I SAW AT E3
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2: Wow! That big, long exclusive trailer they played on that 140-foot wide screen showed me that some actual creativity and imagination went into the art direction of the â2025â segments. It reminds me of Perfect Dark, in a good way. âHyper-real near-futureâ is a sadly underutilized setting in games. Good job, CODBLOPS 2: CODBLOPSER! I will take credit for this, because I did once tell a friend at Infinity Ward, way back during the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare times, that âyâall should make the next one about riot cops in the futureâ. (I am joking, sort of (by which I mean I really did say that).)
Halo 4: Well! Alongside CODBLOPS 2: BLOP HARDER and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Halo 4 looks something like a Disney film. And you know what? Thatâs pretty great. Yay for Disney films! Sometimes, after a hard three days of snuff films and reality TV, kicking back with a root beer float and The Lion King is all you really need.
Also, the peach triangles at the Halo 4 industry party were fantastic. Imagine a McDonaldâs hot apple pie, bite-size, grown up, with peaches inside instead of apples, and raspberry syrup drizzled all over. I ate about two dozen of them. I threw up later, though that doesnât mean they werenât delicious (it means I wasnât feeling well).
My friend Vito Gesualdi, luckily, was a Real Trooper and ate even more than I did.
New Super Mario Bros. 2: Hey! Itâs for the 3DS and itâs More 2D Super Mario, which is great. I will play it because I am basically a child who stretched vertically without aging. The hook of the game is that it has âMore Coinsâ, and the trailer footage showed that coins are Literally Everywhere in this game. It looks like the game has extensive leaderboards and social friend-challenging and some sort of in-game store for coins, which means . . . well, it means that Nintendo has obtained some sort of honorary PhD in social media. So maybe Zynga wonât have to buy them, after all! This means that maybe theyâll stay afloat financially, and give me a Super Mario 3D Land 2 and a 1080p Zelda with voice acting (which you can turn off from the options menu if you so wish (I wonât turn it off (you can, if you want))).
Sleeping Dogs: Oh man! Though the idiom has it that sleeping dogs are something we should let lie, and that a game about ignoring someone or something would have an audience limited to girls Iâve dated in the past, Iâm 9,000% sure the trailer involved punching and shootingâin other words, that this game is about a guy whose failure to take sage advice leads to stylish hard action. I watched someone play the game for a few minutes, and it sure does look about as much fun as having a nail removed from the bottom of your foot, though enough of that. I will be positive: why the heck not set a sandboxy action-adventure game in an Asian metropolis? Why do games always have to be set in New York or a Middle-Eastern battlefield? I applaud the setting as a stylistic choice. We really donât have enough of that.
Watch Dogs: Another game about dogs! Actually, thatâs all Iâve got in the way of snippy comments. This game looks great. Ubisoft really have got the game development process figured all the heck of the way out. Theyâve also seemingly figured out how to force the player to shoot an unarmed man in the face and not make it the focal point of the experience. Remember when Assassinâs Creed came out, and some people were disappointed that the game wasnât exactly like Metal Gear Solid? They sure have taught those people how to like something else, havenât they? Good on them for not ever giving up hope. And now hereâs Watch Dogs: it looks like Assassinâs Creed in postmodern Chicago. I hope the penultimate scene is in Wrigley Field and the final encounter involves hacking a pizza.
Assassinâs Creed III: Whoa! That certainly is the most graphically impressive pirate-shipping Iâve ever seen in an electronic entertainment.
Far Cry 3: Wow! Itâs got four-player co-op. Left 4 Cry
Splinter Cell: Blacklist: Alright! Another game with âBlackâ in the title. Black ops, black lists. SCBLIST. I remember when the first Splinter Cell came out, and some people cried about it being âtoo linearâ. I sort of loved it for thatâthen again, Stuntman: Ignition is one of my favorite games of all-time: a game that presents you delicately orchestrated Rube-Goldberg situations and asks you to poke all the right places in the right order with the right amount of force. Splinter Cell has carried its own torch and beat its own drum decently well enough for many years, though itâs always been in the tricky position of having fans expect things that they havenât any conceivable reason to expect. For example: sprawling non-linearity. What elite government agent devises an adaptable plan? Doesnât the whole idea of having a âplanâ hinge on the plan being perfect and the intel being reliable? For whatever itâs worth, the new Splinter Cell is exciting to me. It has huge graphics and it proudly wears its emphasis on precision and mindfulness. In an ocean of games about Americans shooting dudes up in foreign lands, at least hereâs one that isnât messy and shamelessly gory.
DmC: Hey haters: Danteâs haircut is pretty cool. Also, have you considered that maybe the game is an origin story and that, late in the narrative, his hair will turn white? Remember when you all shrieked and cried tears of blood because the hero of Devil May Cry 4 was a guy who looked exactly like Dante yet wasnât Dante? Remember how Dante was the hero of the game, anyway? Calm down: this is a Japanese publisher. Theyâre not going to do anything different.
Wreckateer: Yeah! When I told people (repeatedly) to play this, they kept asking if âRocketeerâ was still a relevant license. This is because E3 is stupidly loud. Developer Iron Galaxy demoed this game at the Microsoft press event, and the Twittersphere was alive with snippy tweets re: it being âAngry Birds Kinectâ. First of all, Angry Birds is 2D, so itâs more like Angry Birds 3D Kinect. Second of all: itâs great. I have owned a Kinect for a year and used it only to show friends and colleagues how stupidly ill-suited it is to navigating menus. Well, hereâs a game for it, and itâs actually fun. My living room is ready.
Tomb Raider: Yay! How many times have they rebooted Tomb Raider, now? Itâs nice to see that someone involved played Uncharted and was like, âLetâs do thatâonly faster.â Iâm sure that the demo levels prepared for expos are jam-packed with Exciting Moments in such a density as would never appear in any natural game-playing outside those two or three minutes. I can forgive the demo for being so shamelessly rollercoastery. It had some neat hooks, and I bet they made a neat game out of those hooks. Notice how I am avoiding the whole city-bus-sized âhyper-sexed torture-pornâ angle of this game: thatâs intentional. I donât want to start down that slippery slope with some sticky patches. Weâd be here for the rest of the summer.
Alternate comment re: Tomb Raider: across the street from the Los Angeles Convention Center is a building that houses both a Hooters and an Excalibur. Hooters is a restaurant where the waitresses wear halter tops and short-shorts and prance around with cleavage and midriff on display. Excalibur is a medieval-themed restaurant. Neither of these places serves good food, which doesnât matter, because the food at the Los Angeles Convention Center will literally kill you. The problem lies in choosing between Hooters and Excalibur. Many a former GameStop employee (who just a month ago learned how to legally establish his own game company) stood in this parking lot with brain slashed vertically in half, a little tornado in his stomach, indecisive, dying between those two restaurants like a donkey between two bales of hay: how can you possibly choose one over the other? My friends, I tell you the solution: eat a low-sugar âprotein plusâ Power Bar while playing Tomb Raider. It looks to satisfy all those needs. And with only two grams of sugar!
tim rogers is a video game developer who sometimes accidentally writes things. you can follow him on twitter
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