What’s New At E3?

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, is quite possibly the single most exciting event of any gamer’s year. It’s a magical time, almost like a gamer’s Christmas, when all the new games, consoles, and projects are revealed and showed off by their proud developers and producers. It’s the biggest, most important gaming convention of the year, and it sets the tone for every development in the year to come. If that’s so, though, then that means the tone this year is mildly depressing: “same as the one before”.

As I look at the list of games unveiled at this year’s E3, I’m disheartened to see a disproportionately high number of sequels and existing franchises. Nintendo has new Legos, new Wario, new Super Mario; Sony has God of War and LittleBigPlanet, and Microsoft is more or less still being carried by Halo and Gears of War. Even the third-party developers aren’t free of this: EA is still living of its sports games, along with Need for Speed, Battlefield, Dead Space, and others, while Ubisoft has Rayman, the Rabbids, and Far Cry, among others. Everywhere you look, it seems too many companies are content to play it safe with existing franchises.

Still, all is not lost. Sequels do have a sort of magic to them. Despite my personal hatred of this ‘shortcut’ to making a good game, even I have to admit that there’s something about seeing a brand new version of a game you loved. You get to play that game all over again, except it’s all new, and hopefully better. I’m sure there are people out there who couldn’t keep themselves from screaming in joy over God of War: Ascension or Halo 4; I know I couldn’t quite contain myself over the announcement of games like Assassin’s Creed III, Pikman 3, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, and a handful of others. The thought of getting to play upgraded versions of my old favorites – especially Pikman and Luigi’s Mansion – does sort of put things in a brighter light.

It’s not all sequels, either. While EA, Ubisoft, and Nintendo appear to be content with playing it safe, for better or worse, Sony had one or two new things to show us, and Microsoft actually had the best new property-to-sequel ratio at E3. Ascend: New Gods reminds me too much of God of War to really interest me, but it certainly seems impressive in the objective sense. Microsoft’s other offerings include the adorable multiplayer Happy Wars, the do-it-yourself action movie game Joe Danger: The Movie, the mysterious but impressive-looking Lococycle, and a small handful of others. Sony, for their part, have a pair of exciting and gritty new games in development to show off: The Last of Us, which appears to be a game about surviving a plague of some kind, and Beyond: Two Souls, which concerns a runaway girl with extraordinary powers, and possibly an invisible friend. In addition, they also revealed Playstation All-Stars Battle Royal, which despite being a pretty blatant ripoff of Super Smash Bros is an almost instant-buy for me, primarily because it lets me play as a Big Daddy and punch Parrapa the Rapper in the face.

It’s not all good news, though. Nintendo spent their entire press conference talking about the new Wii U, but they failed to mention much about their already existing 3DS, leaving handheld gamers out in the cold a bit. Sony and Microsoft, for their part, very carefully avoided mentioning a thing about any next generation consoles at all, a strange move considering the head start Nintendo has on them. Microsoft further dug themselves into a hole by spending the majority of their press conference forgetting they  were at a gaming convention. Much of their press conference was dominated by talking about “exciting” new features for the X-Box that had nothing to do with gaming; they seem dead-set on turning your X-Box into a jack-of-all-entertainment, at the expense of focusing on games.

Still, there’s no denying that this E3 still had its upsides. Even with problems like a glut of sequels and companies forgetting who they’re marketing to, there were enough gems Battle Royal, Pikman 3, and Two Souls to give me hope for this upcoming year. With such impressive looking games on the horizon, and those few sequels that may actually be worth buying, perhaps the future of gaming isn’t so bleak.

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