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.