I'm So Sorry Does E3 2015: Part the First

Hello, I'm Will. Head writer, editor and only one of those things of the internet's oldest recorded hate crime, I'm So Sorry. During my long, long, fucking long tenure producing uniqueish content for the internet and descent into mental collapse, I've dreamed of going to E3. To rub shoulders with sweaty, watery-eyed pricks in neck beards and Master Chief t-shirts as they bay and cheer for thirty seconds of footage of Link holding a different coloured sword.

To the un-e-nitiated, E3 (or the Electronic Entertainment Expo) is the annual trade fair for the video game industry. A chance for developers, fans and press from around the world to converge on some LA convention centre and revel in a Bacchanalian orgy of hype-mongering announcements, bare-faced lies and Nintendo trying to find a new way to word that they did indeed make another Mario game.

Surely, E3 encapsulates so much of what is wrong with video game culture. So let's validate the shit out of it by commenting on stuff that happened! At length!

This year, I was not actually in attendance (much like every year) as they don't hand out press passes to people who don't ask for them or entertain an audience that could fit inside a non-Time Lord phonebox (which is incidentally as timely a reference as I deserve given the tardiness of this) but thankfully everyone who was recorded every second of it.

So thanks to Youtube's sterling journalism we can all gather round the fire and enjoy pre-rendered trailers that reflect as much on the actual content of the game as five minutes of gameplay from another, totally different game. Seriously. You could realise five minutes in that you're watching footage from Das Boot and it would still tell you as much. Mercifully, developers sometimes take the opportunity to sprinkle down gifts of actual gameplay footage at E3 so we'll mostly be focusing on that.

These are some of the games we might be playing in the next year or two, maybe even enjoying but I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. That's if the developers don't just bottle it like The Last Guardian.

The Last Guardian
Or, as they should be calling it: At Fucking Last, Guardian

The Last Guardian is a vague adventure game from auteur, critic bait makers Team Ico about friendship, yiffing and a giant griffin-puppy you... interact wiiiittthhh, somehow? To solve environmental puzzles aaannndd... get, places? You want to go? For equally unspecified reasons.

It's very much like the game Team Ico announced in 2009 that the developers just stopped making presumably due to a crippling fear of money and success called The Last Guardi-oh. How awkward.

Yes, I can confirm I'm not above an easy target and language parsing joke routines but in my defence, they started making this game in 2007 and we'd only just gotten over the loss. And now they bring all that blue ball grief back up again? Fine. I'll suck it up. We're only at the first entry. Positivity, ho!

So what's new, Team Ico? What bold new strides have you taken in all the years since you last apologised for delays and we all just gave up hope of ever actually seeing this thing come to light?

So, just the same footage then? The same footage we saw six, repeat six E3s ago? With nothing (a subtle kind of nothing, I'll grant you) added or changed? Neeeooooo. Nope. Still positive. Imperceptible HD dusting aside, if The Last Guardian is even half as valiantly unique and emotionally engaging as Team Ico's last effort, Shadow of the Colossus, this should be a must play! Ahh. Made it. Alright, let the hate flow.

Hitman
Or, as they should be calling it: Hitting On Men When They're At Their Most Vulnerable

Agent 47's still bald and hitting men (and presumably some women too) in a professional capacity. And that's about all I'm prepared to say at this point and every point after. Niiieeeeext!

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Or, as they should be calling it: Deus Ex: Mea Culpa

Previous Deus Ex game Human Revolution was a fairly typical, cyberpunk, corporate conspiracy tale wrapped around an aggressive and uncompromising stealth, action and exploratory gameplay system. Or, if you'd prefer, a game that wasn't in the least bit afraid to bend you over a urinal and pound away at your most sensitive areas with a Shake Weight.

The first we saw of this new adventure in bunghole savagery was a trailer that demonstrated exactly why you don't want Square Enix within ten square miles of your workspace as a game designer. But in a strange way, it was pretty accurate. It showed a whole bunch of new cyber-prosthesis-tricks we might be stashing up our techno-sleeves plus some other bullshit that sounded like someone ad-libbing 'meaning of life in a world with advanced medicine 101' and a giant guy more synthetic enhancement than man with a terrible Russian accent. But I guess I can't blame Square Enix for stupidity. It'd be like blaming a kitten for shredding all your R2-D2 throw pillows. They just don't know any better.

Then Eidos gave us a whole demo showing most of those things. There's apparently a more balanced open combat system this time but the day I believe that will be the same one I return my 'Angsty, Nitpicking Wanker' Loyalty Card. But the new armour skill looks pretty handy, covering returning 'hero' Adam Jensen in glossy black vector art and making him immune to damage briefly.

But enough about all that boring violence let's talk about something central to Deus Ex: humans! And Adam's relationships with the squishy mortals. We didn't get much of a look at them apart from a brief example of one of the series' typical Talking Boss Fights which were like oratory Minesweeper but more luck-based. Other than that there was a pilot who'll presumably be ferrying Jensen around the world despite not liking him for no other perceivable reason than token character conflict which is a shame because there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to dislike Jensen. [Side note: Did Malik (your other pilot) die at the end of the last one? Because I enjoyed her.]

Adam Jensen has the same kind of misplaced self-pity as Kratos or Max Payne and their stubborn refusal to be grateful for anything.

"Boo-hoo, man crossed a line that he wasn't meant to cross and now I can pull a minotaur's horn off and feed it to him or gun down eight favela kids while halfway in and out of a breaking window but why does no-one feel sorry for me?"

I mean, if I was Adam Jensen and woke up on the operating table to find someone'd brought me back from the dead and also grafted sunglasses directly into my face and replaced my arms with swords, the first thing I'd say is:

"Ok, I do remember agreeing to a donor card but not so much signing anything about putting things into my body after I died. What's that? I can turn invisible and punch through walls and shoot a thousand exploding ball bearings out of my armpits? All righty then. I'll let it slide this one time. But if I get killed again, I've got three words for you, Doctor: Vibrating. Laser. Dick."

XCOM 2
Or, as they should be calling it: How To Do Sequels Of Remakes Of Sequels: Vol Unknown

Firaxis Games showed off some different flavours of alien and weaponry including swords because what sci-fi game would be complete without them, eh, Mass Effect? But otherwise it's the same trial, error and combat loss we all know and love from 2012's Enemy Unknown. Which means there'll unavoidably come a time when you have to tearfully put down your favourite sniper like Old Yeller because he got mind controlled by a Sectoid Commander.

Pro tip: Make your inevitable failures potentially and tragically prophetic by naming your starting line of soldiers after your closest friends! Incidentally, that's probably why I always had so much trouble with the last one because you can't fight off an entire alien invasion with only three blokes. Ha! Oh.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Or, as they should be calling it: Bring Me The Head Of Editing. No, bring me the head of the head of editing. What do you mean, why? Because of the film, idiot. I was trying to do a thing. Ah, fine, forget it. Moron. 'S funny. 

There's a fair bit of footage from The Phantom Pain floating around the internet after demonstrations at TGS so go watch those if you care so much. Jeez, fine. Here's a taste.

With such extensive coverage already you'd think there wasn't a whole lot more for Konami to show us at E3 this year so they apparently took that as a sign to dial up the stupid until it was more in line with Kojima's resting, redline idiocy. You know, the kind that led to scenes like tech-savvy kid dropping a bootlog in his hacker pants on an active battlefield. Or Senator Hulk Hogan flipping you the bird from the cockpit of his giant robot spider. Snnnaaaaaakkkkeee!

Introducing, the Metal Gear Walker! A man-sized droid that looks like Chappie robo-impregnated the surprised head of a personnel crane and fits about as naturally and believably in the period and scenario as a fucking luck dragon. Which would incidentally be exactly as noticeable to soviet guards in the dimension everyone except Hideo Kojima lives in.

Soviet Guard 1: "Hey, comradevic. Is there a man hiding on board that extremely armed mech speeding into our compound?"

Soviet Guard 2: "Nyet that I can see, buddyin."

Soviet Guard 1: "Okey-coke, then. Just checking. You know, guardin'. Pays to ask these questions sometimes."

Soviet Guard 2: "I hear that. Because I am in range of you as you make that noise."

Soviet 1: "Ha. Guard joke. Love it. Hey, why are we speaking English?"

Soviet 2: "Ah, suka. I bet we're in a thing."

Soviet 1: "Da. Must be a thing."

Soviet 2: "Would certainly explain the distasteful stereotyping."

OK, I'm done with that.

I suppose the cassette tapes lying around the world you can collect and make your own soundtrack with are more applicable to the timeline than, say, robots, iPhones or witches. But excuse me if half-cyborg, greatest soldier ever (apparently) Big Boss aka Snake aka Jack Bauer jamming to 80s power ballads seems a tad out of character.

Mass Effect: Andromeda
Or, as they should be calling it: Gene Roddenberry's Spacetacular Adventure In Alien Sexing

Bioware said they were pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed Mass Effect 3's multiplayer segment, myself among them. It had this sort of free market of ideas feel despite being absolutely riddled with microtransactions. And if you didn't want to cough up real money but fancied the idea of test driving the game as one of the universe's many, fabulous alien races like Krogan, Asari or Collector, you faced an immense grind of time, limited map variety and missions as routine as a menstruating pocket watch. But. And it's a large, shapely but, it was interesting.

I don't usually give much credit or time to multiplayer features because I like my games to have endings and be winnable but Bioware pumped a lot of effort into it over at least a year after the game's release and is technically the last thing they did with the Mass Effect universe up until now.

And for its drawbacks which, let's be honest, were many and grievous, it showed how naturally varied and deep the game's core mechanics really were when you weren't saddled with boring old human, N7 space marine Commander Shepard. And not just that but how fully and richly they'd populated their world over the course of those three games. The possibilities were positively juicy. And once we'd actually gotten a taste of playing as a Turian, or a Phantom or Kai Leng, we were all just begging for the next in the franchise to let us go Dragon Age a little and choose our own species at least. Mass Effect 3's multiplayer wasn't just a bigger draw than anyone expected, it sired an entire community that saw what Bioware could achieve if given room to spread their wings a little.

So hopes have been high for a while to say the least. Not least, because developers said from the get-go that Shepard would have bugger-all to do with entry number 4. And how did Bioware respond to our excitement of all the colourful possibilities the next game could bring in their fascinating world? With a two minute trailer that showed a human-shaped N7 space marine, holding the same gun we've been using since 2010. It wasn't so much a swing and a miss as a half-hearted paw at a target in a different galaxy several generations down the line. I honestly wanted to cry a little.

But Commander Unnamed was using a different flavour of galaxy map plus, he was wearing this tasteful cashmere collar number so baby steps, I guess. Wait. Jetpack. I meant tasteful jetpack number. And who doesn't love jetpacks? They sure were fun in the multiplayer on the Turian bird monster I fucking want to play as you cockteasing pillocks!

The No Show Award
And the winner is: Persona 5 

We know Atlus are making Persona 5, a game that if even remotely like its true predecessor, will be about as Japanese as its possible to be without being wrapped in seaweed and tentacles.

Whether or not it turns out to be actually good is a question for otaku and slightly less otaku critics but I'm prepared for an RPG with depth and complexity and that unique, melancholy sense of atmosphere the Japanese are so good at when they're not fussing about breakdancing cyborg ninjas and raping schoolgirls.

***

That's all we've got time for today, but check back here soon for the next instalment of Games Coming Out In Future And What We Know About Them if someone boring had been in charge of titling. 

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it'll be up top there. No, all the way up. No. Up. That way. The opposite way you've been scrolling to get here. Actually, you know what? I don't need your kind. Go home. Yes, you. Christ, I feel stupider just for acknowledging you. Is stupid infectious? Stupid question. Of course it is and you're like Typhoid fucking Mary. CLOSE THIS WINDOW BEFORE YOU MAKE ME FORGET MY MOTHER'S FACE.

Thank you. Cretin.

Minor Irritations: The 5 Most Quibbliest Quibbles In Video Gaming

YOU SUCK.

We're always supposed to feel sorry for Elves, aren't we? And how about that for an opening sentence that waves goodbye to majority viewing before they've even pulled up their idiot pants? But seriously. In every fucking game, film and change these fey, pansexual lop-ears are introduced as tragic figures, complaining loudly from their ghettos and tree forts because humans walked in and rebuilt fabulous castles all over their arbitrarily superior architecture. You'd think it was some tortuous metaphor for Christianity's treatment of paganism or in fact, anyone except them but it's probably not. Right?

Did no-one think to ask whether Elven civilisation was really so great when humans conquered it so easily and consistently across so many franchises? I'm guessing no, but speaking of barely thinking and jingoism, here are a few examples of video game issues that itch fervently even in the face of far graver mistakes. 

The RPG: Relative, Pointless, Grab-bagging. 

Where you might have suffered this: Grand Theft Auto, Shadows of the Damned (Yes, I know you haven't heard of it), Call of Duty. 

If there was a video game review swear box for overused terms it would include: 'fluid', 'organic' and in big gold letters at the top maybe underlined a few times: 'RPG elements'. In regular people speak, they mean 'doesn't flow like a river of bricks uphill', 'not completely scripted, empty spectacle' and 'contains some kind of system of character improvement' respectively.

They're all lazy as Sunday as descriptions go but particularly the latter. Because the definition of RPG to me is that the number-crunching takes a higher priority than twitchy, caffeinated reflexes or, as a COD player would call it, skill. You see, all video games are built on numbers. In the same way that a church might be built on a pile of bones. In an action game, like a shooter say, the mathematics might be as simple as 'x bullets + face = zero face'. 

Think of it this way. If you skipped straight to the final mission of name any Battlefield game, it'd be doable no matter what. But if you skipped straight from the opening area of Final Fantasy XII to the final boss, you'd be ground into fucking paste before you'd had your morning coffee. 

In a true RPG, improvement of your character or team or whatever is paramount to success if not the whole damn source of fun in the first place. Asking us to spend in-game bucks or time in minigames or what have you to make some tiny, inconsequential improvement to our gun damage or sprint distance in a game where you could breeze through the singleplayer regardless is just busywork. Although if there was ever a word that defined games like Grand Theft Auto, it's busywork. Or, maybe: "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-Bleuurgghh! Arrggh! Bad decisions!" Not a word. Still true.

The Moral Choice: Dickhead Or Cartoonishly Evil Dickhead?

Where you might have suffered this: Infamous, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dishonored, Splinter Cell. 

Paragon or Renegade? Good or Evil? Handsome or Sweet Laser Scars?

Let me tell you a story. One day, in a universe far, far away, not long enough ago (but for argument's sake let's say early noughties), a massively drunk and self-hating game designer named Bo Vicodin had an idea. Of course, 'ideas' were punishable with twenty lashes in the video game design slave pits but a publisher overseer overheard it at the AI coalface and passed it up the chain. And it went something like this: Instead of offering meaningful options in gameplay, developers could just rewrite half the cutscenes along sickeningly contrived moral lines and make the actual game bit half as long! Genius!

"But, hang on," Bo whimpered from the warg enclosure, hungry jaws already clamped around his atrophied legs and heartily regretting opening his big, fat dicktrap to start with.
"Nobody's going to fall for that. If the game isn't fun to play in the first place, no-one's going to play it all the way through again just to see what the cutscenes are like when the main character's an unlikeable prick or whingeing niceboy. Surely it would make more sense to split the difference and make a character whose at least likeable or at the very least makes sense?"

But his only reply was lasers, now and forever. Blue lasers if you chose the 'good' options, red if 'evil'.

Leaving this Renegade metaphor behind for a moment, moral choice systems do let you leave a slightly more personal mark on a game and cement your identity in it where appropriate. Problem is, it rarely is appropriate. For one thing, there's no such thing as 'evil'. It's all perspective. And imposing a 'bad' ending as a result of playing with a Machiavellian sense of victory at any cost is just going to make most gamers feel like they've suffered an especially protracted 'Game Over'. As if the game's saying:

"Sure, you saved the world or whatever the point of this was, now, would you like to try again but be less of a cunt about it?"

And you know what? Now that you mention it, probably not, game. 

The Map-ular Vision: Sprinting Blind.

Where you might have suffered this: Far Cry, The Witcher. 

LOOK AT THIS AND NOTHING ELSE.

Minimaps are useful like Azealia Banks has a terrifying mouth. You can't focus on anything else and I've been waiting to make that reference since 212. But I was too afraid to. It's like staring down a sassy Saarlac's throat except you just know it would emasculate you on the way down.

In most games focusing excessively on the minimap's not much of an issue. It's like the Batman Arkham games' 'Detective Vision'. There's precious little reason to turn it off beyond aesthetics. Sure you're not paying much attention to the lavishly created world the game artists spent so much time and neglected their kids and marriage for, but in a few select kind of games, making the minimap too useful is a recipe for players' furious, impotent deaths.

Example: Some open-world style games let you jump a hundred feet, powerslide trainlines and float impishly around the map with as much regard for gravity as intact objects full of money. And some will murder you for falling more than a few vertical feet. I've spent more time cursing Isaac Newton in the Witcher 3 than werewolves and that's a game where I've killed so many wraiths that ghosts dare their friends to spend the night at my house. It's a game with miles of open terrain but fangy, clawed death instead of walls. And I've still been killed by more stairwells than mythological monsters.

It's one of those tragic side effects of playing games routinely. Slowly, yet inexorably, all matter moves towards entropy as all game players move towards a state of maximum efficiency. If your game's dodge roll is faster than running, it is just a matter of time before everyone is flailing objective-ward like a single-minded tumble weed. So it is with the minimap. The more useful information it shows: quest-givers, fast-travel markers, enemies, herbs, treasure - the more players are going to fall fatally down pits they never knew were there screaming the injustice of it all. 

The Suicide Commute: Just Kill Me Now. 

Where you might have suffered this: Sleeping Dogs, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, open-world video games too numerous to mention. 

It's a London thing.

Someone very wise once said that a sprawling, open world is only as fun as the method you get around it, because in our tragically boring, dragon-less 'real' world, commuting is one of the most severe causes of stress and anxiety. So in one of Rockstar's more tacitly awful decisions, they said:

"Fuck good sense, this commuting lark is exactly the kind of boredom and frustration we want for Grand Theft, hell, why limit ourselves? Boredom and frustration for all!"

So horrifically lengthy travel time between every fucking mission ended up in Red Dead Redemption too. And all the other developers intent on ripping off the franchise weren't to be outdone.

"Rockstar won't beat us when it comes to terrible decisions!" Proclaimed the makers of Mafia, Watch Dogs, Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs and all the other watery, dead-eyed, crimebox knock-offs.

And that's how we ended up with a thousand games where your involvement as a player is limited to ferrying twats around, wasting millions of collective consumer hours getting stuck in traffic. 

The Impossible Conversation: Because Everyone Hates Being Cut O-

Where you might have suffered this: Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, Dragon Age, The Witcher, video games of all kinds too numerous to mention. 

I get the feeling that this is starting to sound like a one man declaration of war against Rockstar Entertainment, and while I do believe they genuinely lost track of what the word 'fun' means back sometime around Vice City, they're by no means the worst thing to happen to games.

But this isn't meant to be some grand evaluation of gaming development and culture, hell no. We're here to give credit to the pettiest and niggliest of my petty niggles. So here it is:

Sometimes, games will ask you to walk slowly towards an objective with a companion while they talk at you. And sometimes the developers write your companion more dialogue than they have time to say on your stroll, so are cut off as you get you where meant to be going by a cutscene or new stream of dialogue.

Yes, that's it.

Believe me when I say it doesn't sound like much but you only had to read it. I had to find a way to articulate a quibble that perspective would drown without even trying. But try and believe me again when I say that trying to get involved in a game with, let's say more ambient storytelling (mentioning no names!) that this is a special kind of irritation that creeps into your brain to lay its eggs before manifesting in the kind pointless agitation that makes you want to throw a shoe at the screen in the vain hope it'll make the developers less stupid. Mostly because it's so easily avoided. I mean, how hard can it be to time how much dialogue there is against how long it'll take to for you to get where you're going?

It may well be that I have a particular weak spot for this issue because it's conditioned me. I play games for empowerment and escapism. If I wanted to devote my life to a yawning chasm that does not end and cannot be won, I wouldn't be here, furiously and drunkenly typing to myself, I'd be slightly more ruined and 'playing' World of Warcraft. In so much as you can play a second job that you pay to take part in.

The point is, brainwashing is for Blizzard fans but gaming's absurd walking conversations have me slowing to a complete stop as soon as they begin even on the off-chance that I overshoot and miss some dialogue. And sometimes, games throw an ever-so-special sprinkle of bacon bits on the wilted, impotent fury salad that is my life by cutting off the guy's verbal shits to say: "So is your lazy arse coming, or what?" And there is never a microwave brutal enough to do to the game what is in my heart at that moment.

It's not even like its a limited kind of problem, it's fucking everywhere. In almost every game where NPCs add to world building. And that's like saying it's not a problem in games where murder doesn't add to progress.