Okay, so two Scottish locations - entire UK confirmed.
I hear they were gonna add Dundee but it turns out that every time the cars in game hit the potholes on Victoria Road the driveshaft shat itself out onto the road.
Tunic looks great.
Doom Eternal looks great.
Wolfenstein Youngblood looks great.
Microsoft had a way stronger showing than I thought they would and that Cyberpunk trailer ruled. Gears of X-Com looks pretty neat and a surprising turn of events. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice could be a new Tenchu game which means it's going to have to join my 1000/1000 Gamerscore pile. Division 2 is probably (alas) going to be a Day 1 for me because I really, really dug the original. Just Cause 4 looks like it's Rico Vs A Weather Machine and looks to be doing what Crackdown wants to do (not bitter).
I can't tell what Crackdown wants to do, or maybe I just don't like its gung-ho, hoo-rah attitude (am I getting old?). I could be misremembering, but for all its in-game ridiculousness, the original carried itself with a bit more decorum. Swapping the disappointed headmaster tones of the Voice of the Agency for Terry Crews doing an over-the-top Lester Speight impression feels like a bad move, to me.
I can neither confirm nor deny that the development of Angry Terry The Videogame has been a struggle.
Just looking at the trailers, it seems- rather passionless. It doesn't have the joie de vivre that Saints Row had, or the explosive fun of Sunset Overdrive. It looks drab which, for a game that's bathed in holograms and neon, is surprising.
It looks too chaotic, which I realise maybe seems like a silly criticism to level at a Crackdown game.
It's been a few years since I've played the original, to be fair, but although it could descend into framerate-choking pandemonium pretty regularly I never remember it being unparseable chaos. And as freely as it allowed you to explore, it always felt like there was a goal - even if it was only an objective you set for yourself.
My strongest memories of Crackdown aren't of explosions, car chases or gunfights - they're of standing on top of a building and the noise from the city streets below barely audible over the wind; figuring out the puzzle of climbing the buildings; finding that hidden entrance to the Shai Gen tower halfway up; working out how to get the SUV onto the rooftop I needed to for a Stunt Ring.
Still catching up with Sony's presentation - I've only managed to see The Last of Us 2's trailer yet. It's probably not safe for work.
I honestly don't know what to make of this. I was a big fan of the first game (with some major caveats), but following the same characters is disappointing after they set up an entire world to tell stories in - and upping the violence feels like it's leaning into the least interesting aspects of the first game.
But there's quite a bit of stealth in this which absolutely got me the way the original did; it's just frustrating that murdering every opponent is presented as the best route to progression, and there's not much to indicate that a less confrontational path is available.
Death Stranding continues to look f–king weird in a way that no doubt appeals to fans of Kojima's previous work, but is honestly a bit alienating to me.
I've only managed to see The Last of Us 2's trailer yet. It's probably not safe for work.
It's just much too violent. It seems to revel in it, too, which is a shame. The best bits of that trailer were the (beautiful, well-acted) conversations at the dance.
Short version: it's BioWare doing Destiny except you're Iron Man.
Longer version: single-player story stuff in an instanced hub area, multiplayer co-op missions in a shared open world. The lore is that the Gods(?) abandoned a world partway through building it, and the remaining worldbuilding equipment is still sparking off, causing Weirdness; an enemy faction are trying to harness it to turn the Anthem of Creation into a weapon. Or something.
The lore is that the Gods(?) abandoned a world partway through building it, and the remaining worldbuilding equipment is still sparking off, causing Weirdness;
Zelda at launch
Mario Odyssey
Fire Emblem Warriors
Mario Kart (granted, an upgrade rather than new, but still requires effort)
Splatoon 2 and the substantial expansion coming in the summer
ARMS
Pokken Tournament
Kirby Star Allies
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze
Hyrule Warriors DE
and then…
Mario Tennis Aces next month
Captain Toad in July (yes, another upgrade, still needs bodies to make)
Mario Party in October
Two versions of Pokemon coming in November
Smash in December
Metroid 4 in the works
ANOTHER Pokemon game in the works for mid-2019
But yeah, you're right, definitely not a reasonable number of games.
Fuck sake, Bri. :\
(Go ahead, do the 'Oh, but Nintendo didn't develop all of those things'… I'll still say you're being silly)
You forgot Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Mario & Rabbids.
Plus of course about a million squillion indie titles on the eShop. Anyone who's got a Switch and doesn't think they have enough games to play on it needs help.
Does everybody else find E3 to be too much? All of the news and announcements just get lost and I find myself just thinking that I cannot be arsed with it all, not to mention that it brings out the absolute worst entitled petty childish behaviour in "gamers" with 40 year old men bickering over who "won" and the like, I've no fucking clue what games I fancy playing out of the announcements because I just switched off after a while and because im still playing persona 5 with Dishonored 2, doom, FFXII, Yakuza kiwama all still unplayed and I've pretty much abandoned monster hunter world at the moment but keep meaning to go back to it
I keep up with E3 the way I keep up with gaming news generally, but to be honest there's not much I'm interested in this year that I wasn't interested in before. I knew I'd want The Last of Us part 2, to the extent that I switched the video off as soon as the gameplay started; I knew I'd want Cyberpunk; and I knew I wouldn't give a shit about Death Stranding long before I saw Norman Reedus wander around Iceland and then use a baby in a jar to stealth past invisible smoke ghosts(?).
Actually, I tell a lie - I'm marginally more interested in Anthem now, even if I couldn't tell you at all why.
The problem with E3, for my money, is just its density. It's three to four days of back-to-back breathless hype (and, increasingly, violence) that is frankly kind of numbing after a while.
Sony and Nintendo's strategies, of showing a relatively smaller slate of games at relative length, might leave them looking like runners up in the E3 hype grinder, but honestly it's more the sort of thing I'm interested in, so I can digest what I'm seeing before we get whiplashed onto the next big-budget killathon.
I think it's bloody brilliant. It's the one week a year I'll accept ridiculous hype, memes and conversations about 'who won'. Logically I know it's not about "winning" – but for a week I just don't care.
I whooped when Sony gave Microsoft shade over their crap Xbone launch. I cheered when Microsoft announced game, after game, after game. Even though none of this actually affects me, because I'll always buy all consoles.
It's raising my eyebrow a little to see how many game news outlets openly admitting how exhausting the numbing spectacle of E3 is, within articles under clickbait headlines about some pointless minutiae framed as controversy.
(The latest debacle, apparently, is that Cyberpunk is first- instead of third-person, greatly disappointing people who assumed CDPR would only ever do over-the-shoulder because The Witcher did it. I can only imagine these same people are going to be devastated to see that there's technology beyond the 16th century in it to boot.)
It's a Tenchu-flavoured Soulsborne, so I'm in. Ghost of Tsushima looks potentially interesting too, though the fact it's developed in the West is very obvious. Hopefully they're sufficiently different/spaced out in terms of release that, assuming they are both good, we don't get Feudal-era fatigue.
Otherwise I've already forgotten about at least half of what little I watched of E3 this year, but will keep an eye on those, TLoU2, Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Cthulhu, Spider-Man and a couple of others. Also find myself surprisingly interested in potentially replaying Catherine, oddly enough.
(I did find Microsoft's indie charm offensive quite amusing, but find myself hoping that they didn't get exclusive rights to anything (else, after Ori and Cuphead) that I like the look of.)
It confirms that they've not gone the "recreate all of the UK" route, too.
For Forza Horizon 4, the team at Playground Games travelled around Britain, distilling its most beautiful driving environments into a series of fictionalised locations, capturing everything from the rugged beauty of the Lake District to the quaint charm of a Cotswold village.
