Our Week in Games – Week 43 E3 Special

Our Week in Games – Week 43 E3 Special

The brave men and women who attended E3 are probably still lying in bed a quivering mess, struggling to comprehend the horrors of the show floor. Either that or they are planning when to lunge next at a gaming show. I’ll be testing out the lunge room at Rezzed next Sunday with Nick (come say hi!) and I might just report back on my findings. Though maybe not through video. Anyway, this is Our Week in Games, but with an E3 twist. What have we made of E3…read on.

Chris

E3 saw Microsoft come unstuck even more than they had been after their initial reveal of the Xbone. Sony capitalised by coming out with a brilliant (in comparison) price point. Nintendo didn’t do much apart from show off their usual wares. Behind all of this, nVidia quietly held the fort for the venerable PC.

Was I really amazed by anything this year at E3, well I’ve already talked about the console makers along with EA and Ubi, but I have to say, the more I see of The Division, the more impressed I am. Just watch this video, it is seven minutes of brilliance. In a world of HALO’s and Battlefield’s, this is the kind of game that makes me take notice. I just wish I had spent the time last week to watch it so I could talk about it in more depth in my Ubisoft article. Tis a shame.

This weekend also saw me purchase Kerbal Space Program in a little Steam sale on it. I am quite excited to play it after all the praise Nick has sung about it.

 

Edcrab

I didn’t follow E3 so much as track it through the woods a day after the fact, following a suspicious trail of footprints, broken branches, and dazed Microsoft reps recovering from all the sick burns sent their way by the entire internet. In this analogy I guess the new Xbox is a yeti or something. Blurry and out of focus and the subject of a whole lot of jokes, most of which I don’t get.

Turns out Microsoft’s criticism is pretty deserved. The whole thing was a cringe-worthy affair, now further confused by various rumours and leaks that make it sound like the Xbone isn’t a completely lost cause, just let down by a terrible presentation. Guess we’ll see whether the hole gets dug any deeper.

I’m not much of a console gamer, but I always like seeing news about the increasingly large (and diverse) roster of the Smash Bros games, even if I rarely get to play them myself: Megaman, sure, I might’ve called Megaman becoming part of it. But not the Wii-Fit Trainer, there’s an addition that came out of the blue. And The Witcher 3 is looking great, but I’m not fooling anyone; I’ll be seeing it on PC. Possibly not even my PC, depending on the required specs: I’m reminded of how the second game was one of the reasons I invested in a new graphics card.

Oh, and as for things I’ve played recently. Games. Stuff. Uh… I grabbed LEGO Lord of the Rings while it was on sale? It’s supposed to be fun! But I haven’t played it yet! I am not doing so good at the whole actually-playing-games thing of late.

Nick

As a predominately PC-centric gamer, the millions spent on E3 each year seem to me like such a waste. Each year I’m forced to sit and watch publishers and console manufacturers do their upmost to pretend the most powerful development platform in existence is just a non-issue, a tertiary platform that will just go away if everyone just ignores it for long enough.

Only Nvidia had the guts to stand up and point out the obvious – that PCs are more powerful, more flexible and have been capable of the ‘innovations’ that Sony and Microsoft have been promoting for at least the past few years.

Another year, and what do we see? More brown, more explosions and more buzz-words. This event isn’t for fans, nor is it for the press. It’s for the marketers, the shareholders and the execs. It’s for the people that lap up terms like ‘digital ecosystems’, ‘innovations’ and ‘a unified user experience.’

And another thing – It’s time publishers stopped telling us that exclusives are good news. They benefit no-one but the publishers, the platform owners and the share holders, not the people who want to play your games.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be packing for Rezzed.

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