Dragon Age visuals with the High Dragon were sexy as fuck. Totally seamless. And the texture in that fire... wow. Of course, I'd take good plot and combat system over graphics any day of the week.

New TC: The Division trailer was pretty badass. FPS isn't really my bag, but I think I'll be compelled to pick up this and Destiny.

So excited for first real next gen Assassin's Creed. Black Flag was fun, but I've been waiting a long time for a French Revolution AC.

Watching the Playstation replay now cus I missed it.

Oh mah gerb Destiny. Was that Dinklage?

The Order looks great. Kinda like a Silent Hill / Bioshock fusion.

Not paying 10 bucks for Entwined.

Dat Infamous DLC.

Bloodborn just looked kinda squicky for squickieness' sake. :/

FC4... meh. I don't know if I'd buy.

Some of those 8bit PS4 exclusives look fun as shit.

No Man's Sky exploded my brainpan with those colors. Holy crap.

Lol @ subdermal camera Mortal Kombat fatalities.

Yada yada another MGS.

Arkham Knight. Hot Sweet Sticky Jesus that looks amazing. Scariest Scarecrow ever?

I guess I have to get around to finishing Uncharted 3 by 2015. Le sigh.

Witcher combat looks pretty damn great. That's to be expected. I wish Projekt RED had more money for graphics though.

 

Ok, Fuck all that noise. Abzu, no man's sky, bloodborn and a little game called Uncharted 4.

Though, as much as UC4 gave me goosebumps, the first two blew my fucking mind!

(full disclosure, a part of me died when i saw naughty dog instead of studio Japan. Maybe TGS? #wishfulthinking

 

Holy shit, totally forgot Grim Fandango, inFamous dlc and the rest...

 

No Man's Sky looks great. LBP3 looks adorable. Weird that they followed LBP up with Bloodborne. Besides ~15 minutes spent on things that weren't games, I feel that Sony did really well.
Also the Far Cry gameplay. Can't forget that.

 

I was hoping for either KH or FF15 from the Sony panel. Anyone know if Square is doing their own panel or we'll be waiting another two years?

 

Sony's press conference was very good, but man that was dragged down pretty hard in the middle.

Square confirmed that they would not be showing either of those games. Maybe at TGS, who knows.

 

I will cry manly tears of despair if we don't see at least a smidgen of FF15 at TGS.

 

Guys. Guyyyyyys. There's gonna be a new Phanom Fuckin' Dust!

Gods above and below but I LOVED that game!

 

GTAV is finally coming to the new consoles and PC this fall..

 

Oh my, look at the time. We almost missed getting to sit around listening to IGN suck every dick in existence as a bunch of corporate representatives stand around pretending their shit doesn't stink.

Go make yourself a sandwich. You're going to need it.

Oh hey look, it's Not Gran Turismo again! Back for revenge with another moderately dull lineup of cars and graphics that still aren't up to par even when graphics are supposed to be 80% of your reason for existing.

I guess going home with the silver in a competition of two is worth it for some people.

A good idea on paper that might turn out to be moderately fun, provided the people creating it can wean themselves off of the apparent belief that the core experiences of gaming are derived from mixing and matching different 'nerdy' pop culture buzzwords together like the most disgustingly hipster game of Mad Libs ever conceived.

Robot Zombie Space Dragon Pirate Ninja? How about shit cock fuck ass, you cunts? You're creating a toolbox for recreational game development, not an episode of Family Guy or the Big Bang Theory.

We've known for years that Clancy was incapable of performing in bed with his wife unless he closed his eyes and imagined a noble but wounded America being subjected to a land invasion and/or occupation by foreign hostile forces in possession of nuclear offensive capabilities and an arsenal of weapons and armaments inexplicably larger and more comprehensive than our own.

If you were expecting something different, prepare for disappointment. Notable for having an in-game co-op communications system that seems to modeled to behave as though the characters in-game were actually talking to each other, as opposed to the players talking to one another while the characters on the screen do things in quasi-mute silence. This interesting mechanic made it's debut by being completely misused in the gameplay demo by a group of 'players' who showed off that it's the 'fake' in fake gamer girl and fake gamer guy that has everyone foaming at the mouth, and not the other three words in whatever existent combinations they happen to occur in.

Apparently, Microsoft doesn't just pay people in the audience to provide fake applause, they also pay the people who play their games to provide fake commentary.

Could be renamed Fallout: Watchdogs with little inaccuracy beyond the (current) absence of giant green men and enraged mutant iguanas. It might actually be worth playing, but if you pretend to be a real person in the game by using the comm-chat for chatter and give away our position to the enemies, I'm going to pretend to be fucking furious and shoot you in the back of the head.

Remakes must be done carefully. The game to remake must be chosen as one that has a strong cult following, and thus would be well-received if it were to be given an updated re-working, and the remake itself must be handled delicately, to ensure that the core traits that made the original so attractive and great are preserved, while the game itself is brought up to the current par for gaming standards.

Microsoft has decided to adopt the bold but clever policy of cutting out all of the above by choosing to remake games that nobody has ever fucking heard of, and then acting like we should all be amazed that they are 'on point' enough to be able to identify what are obviously cult classics and 'in the know' enough to be able to redistribute them with fresh coats of paint to what they assume will be wild applause.

For those of you who don't know what Phantom Dust is, and I would imagine that would be pretty much all of you, it was a game developed entirely in-house by Microsoft with the help of Yukio Futasugi, the director of Panzer Dragoon and Crimson Dragon. It was an "action-strategy" game where the combat and exploration of the game centered around in-game card collecting, and it was created for the sole purpose of appealing to the Japanese audience and selling Xboxes in Japan. It failed spectacularly. You've never played it before because you presumably were not gifted it by a confused relative that was attempting to surprise you, and you've never heard of it because until now, nobody has been stupid enough to try and revive something that was already partially decomposed the moment it was farted out of it's developmental vagina into the waking world.

It's sole redeeming merit was that the card part was actually kind of fun. But then, "the card part" is why Magic: The Gathering makes billions of dollars, and why The Pokemon Trading Card Game for the GBC was fun. It's a proven method. If we could level up cards and socket gems into them, it would literally be gaming heroin.

My point is that there are better games they could have done this to. They couldn't make a game that would sell in Japan. I seriously doubt their ability to remake a game that was made (and failed) to sell in Japan so that it sells in the western world (where it also failed to sell the first time around). They certainly can't do it while "trying to remain true to the spirit of the original."

Already determined to make us hate it from the moment of it's inception by it's chosen name alone, ID@XBOX showed off the versatility of the tools and services the Xbox One would provide to indy developers while pointedly avoiding any mention of the issues people had with the previously stated draconian rules for publishing rights and IP management.

The point remains chalked up in Sony's favor from last year until such a time that Microsoft stops trying to own the sounds independent developers make while breathing in their own living rooms.

Once again, the developers of the iconic Fable series prove to be two days late and a dollar short, as their latest entry to the Fable series is not a new Fable game, but rather yet another entry into the "it's Dungeons & Dragons: The Video Game" queue that was introduced with all the excitement and energy of a company that has hit upon a totally new and novel way to play a game that no one has ever thought of before. Unfortunately, they were beaten to the punch by The Quest for Epic Loot and approximately five hundred independent developers, more or less.

I'm sure once the game is released, Lionhead will be pleased as punch to announce an expansive DLC for Legends that allows the heroes to turn the tables on the evil dungeon master villain by constructing automated 'towers' throughout the maze-like map that will attack incoming enemies, who must traverse the level to attempt to assault a point or fixed object that the heroes are trying to defend.

Good news for fans of arcade fighting games who inexplicably despise Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat, Soul Caliber, and Capcom vs Whoever Will Sell Out Within The Constraints of Our Budget, Killer Instinct Season 2 is confirmed with a large roster of new characters, a new storymode, and a new, 'true' endgame boss character that will be playable.

However, it's not Bloody Roar 5, so I sadly don't really give a fuck.

Skullgirls ftw.

The Kinect and PlaystationMove were terrible ideas, motion sensing was not why the Wii kicked your asses last generation, and Dance Dance Revolution stopped being popular in 2005. Fire the person who vetted this idea immediately.

At least Star Wars Kinect was funny. This is just sad.

Play as an ONI Operative following in the footsteps of Master Chief throughout the course of the preceding games, lapping up his sloppy seconds by being perpetually twenty minutes late to every fight he participated in while searching to uncover the truth that, honestly, the organization you work for probably bollixed up in the first place because they're sociopathic assholes.

Because honestly, we're out of ideas, we're in way over our heads, and we only exist so long as we can convince Microsoft that they need an entire development studio to handle the Halo IP. So we think introducing a new character who we can write a parallel prequel about that breaks no new ground and introduces no new locations or story progress while simultaneously pretending that shoot-punching your way across the galaxy as Chief was actually a soul-searching journey of deep psychological and spiritual significance will help us stall for long enough for us to roll out a few more app games and figure out what the fuck we're going to do next.

Because it's not like the last game they introduced where you played as someone who wasn't a Spartan blew massive rotten donkey scrotum.

The only way it could be worse is if the main character was Sarah Palmer. Being forced to listen to her in Spartan Ops as she reveled in her lack of knowledge about anything beyond hitting things and called the scientists and engineers who keep her ass alive and running "nerds" like a jock from an 80s movie that was displaced out of time was painful enough. Having to put up with her neanderthal ass for an entire game would be unbearable.

I reserve the right to refuse to follow orders from anyone that needs Science Team to put banana stickers on the barrels of her guns so she knows which end to point at the enemies.

At least, I assume they're banana stickers, because bananas are the traditional tools used to try and teach gorillas new behaviors, and I can't imagine her responding well to reflective tape. She might see her own reflection and try to attack it.

Not terribly long ago, Microsoft made the decision to shut down the long-running and venerable Halo multiplayer servers for good. Halo 2 having already been taken down under significant protest from the fanbase, they announced that they would begin shutting down the servers for 3, Reach, and 4 as well.

At the Monday expo of E3 2014, less than 12 hours ago as of this writing, Microsoft announced that they would be re-releasing the entire set of Halo games, not individually, but as a bundle, that will be exclusive to the Xbox One, and that each game included in it will have new servers just for them that will be incompatible with the older versions of the game and unusable on any console besides the Xbox One.

I hope weasels made of ass cancer nest in the prostates of everyone involved with the conception of this idea.

For those of you who don't understand what they're doing, they've just forced everyone who wants to play Halo multiplayer, any Halo multiplayer, to buy an Xbox One, and furthermore, they've forced you to buy every single Halo game in order to do so. It's also a blatant, unsubtle snub at the used game market, because apparently Microsoft hasn't gotten tired of that particular charade.

I will eat the mattresses of a thousand hobos if this 'exclusive bundle deal' costs less than $120 USD. It will probably go for 150, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they ran it as high as 200. That's still technically a savings, provided you intended to purchase every single game in the bundle at full price all along. Obviously, most people don't, and obviously, Microsoft is fully aware of that fact and doesn't give a fuck.

Master Chief's "journey" was a killing spree across the galaxy and at least half of a Terran continent that held absolutely no psychological or spiritual weight whatsoever beyond whatever minute amount is inherent to a mostly amoral joyride at the expense of everything in the immediate area for the ultimate purpose of saving humanity from scary dogmatic aliens and killing as many things that you don't understand as possible while doing whatever it is that the voice in your head tells you to.

Lara Croft's "journey" was a killing and grave-robbing spree across the seven known continents and at least one and a half that weren't supposed to exist that held absolutely no psychological or spiritual weight whatsoever beyond whatever minute amount is inherent to a purely amoral, greedy, and self-centered joyride at the expense of ancient cultures, wildlife, and innocent bystanders for the ultimate purpose of stealing every old and shiny valuable thing that existed in the world and stashing it in your trophy basement like some sort of Batman villain that existed in a world without Batman.

However, much like the sad, depressing, and futile attempts to plumb the stagnant waters of Halo for some deeper meaning that can be used to wring out a few prequel games that basically write themselves and paint the series as being more artistic and intellectual than it is, this most recent stab at creating a new Tomb Raider game has completely and willfully forgotten where it came from in a desperate attempt to convince everyone that the high point of the series is a fourteen-year old flint napping arrows and talking about your adventurer report card with an elderly British gentleman, and not dual-wielding pistols and evading a Tyrannosaurus that was trying to eat you.

I have gone on record repeatedly as stating that Handsome Jack, and by extension everything written by Anthony Burch, is the worst thing that could have happened to the Borderlands franchise, and I am naturally furious that Borderlands 3 is apparently a prequel to 2 where we fucking work for him. Assuming I even decide to get this game, and I sadly probably will because I have friends who I know will definitely get it, I fully intend to buy it used, so Gearbox receives none of my money for it, and I will play it with dialogue and music muted, subtitles turned off, and will use my own mix track of classic rock, chiptunes, dubstep, and orchestral to fill in the background tapestry against which the sounds of constant gunfire and explosions will be set.

I am, however, at the cost of great personal suffering, compelled to admit that Anthony Burch and his pretending-to-be-autistic-because-it-gets-Youtube-hits sister are not the worst thing that could have ever happened to Borderlands.

Borderlands could have been written by Anthony Burch and also attempted to find some deep spiritual significance and psychological motivation behind killing scads of people and stealing their stuff.

Lara Croft's entire character can be summed up in a single, grammatically correct sentence. She is the greatest and most perfect recurring villain Indiana Jones could ever cross paths with, in a world that does not contain Indiana Jones. That is what she is, that is all she is, that is who she is. She takes things because she wants them, she kills people, animals, and things because they get in her way or hinder her progress towards acquiring the things she wants, and she will cheerfully destroy the four thousand year old ruins of an advanced unknown civilization so that she can make off with a glowing crystal gem egg the size of an elephant's liver that she knows absolutely nothing about.

This was precisely what made her so refreshing. Much like the characters in the first Borderlands, Wario in every game he has starred in, and, do a degree, the original Duke Nukem, Lara was patently unheroic, her motivations were both extremely simple and thoroughly selfish, and the plot, such as it was, was moved forwards not by an obligation towards morality, but rather an obligation towards greed and personal gain.

Where other female characters may wail as they were kidnapped, or at best wax poetic on the virtues of heroism, Lara would take what she wanted, her justification was that she wanted it, and if you tried to stop her, she would shoot you in the face. Twice. Because she had two guns.

But sadly, much like Team Ninja's handling of Samus Aran, Crystal Dynamics have sacrificed much what the character once was for the sake of trying to add details and background that was not necessary to a narrative that did not need it.

But at least Lara doesn't have disturbing daddy issues and a tendency to faint and require rescuing from conveniently nearby male marines. Yet.

As far as I'm concerned, Lara Croft and Indiana Jones fought for the Heart of Atlantis in a crumbling jungle temple in the middle of a thunderstorm, and vanished beneath the rubble. No bodies were ever found, and the Heart was missing. And a Tyrannosaurus barged in on the fight at one point. And stuff was on fire. That's how it ended. You can't convince me otherwise.

Shia LaBeouf who?

Here's something you need to understand, Bioware. Your objective here is to convince me that you learned your lesson from last time, and understand now that insulting the player's intelligence and expecting to get away with it is a bad idea. If you can't do that, people are just going to tell you to fuck off, because they remembered what happened the last time you were given free reign and the last three times you made an RPG.

You're not achieving that when you tell us you've created groundbreaking new AI to control never-before-seen enemy types, and then show it off by having a guy who shoots hookshot harpoon lines out of his wrists get attacked by dudes with huge shields and teleporting stabby ninja mages.

You're not achieving that when you build a trailer whose visuals, cut scenes, and continual usage of the word "chaos" in such fun phrases as "possessing strange resistance to the powers of Chaos," "the land is being corrupted by Chaos," and "the world is being invaded by Chaos" seem designed solely to plagiarize as much as humanly possible from Warhammer Fantasy without incurring a lawsuit.

I'm going to need to see enemy types in actual gameplay action besides the ones that existed in Mass Effect multiplayer and in previous Dragon Age games. I'm going to need to see something concrete about the multiplayer you said was going to be a thing but have yet to show off in any capacity whatsoever. And I'm going to need you to show that you have yourselves under control and understand what you real priorities should be, and that you aren't going to shit the bed and pretend it's high art that we're all simply too stupid and unwashed to appreciate or comprehend.

Seeing how you've yet to do any of those things, fuck off. At the moment, you're a used-game purchase at best, and that's only on the merit of the quality of the Mass Effect multiplayer that might hypothetically be repeated in the Dragon Age multiplayer you've yet to show us anything about. And I'm 100% certain that the Mass Effect multiplayer being as good as turned out to be was blind luck on your part anyway. You'd better have something fantastic to show on Tuesday, because you have two shit games, cartoonishly bad business practices, and calling your fandom fucking retards to make up for.

A shockingly much larger number than I ever would have anticipated, a full seven of the games that were on display during the Monday expo were worth the watch. 7/21 isn't bad by E3's notoriously terrible standards. That's a full one-third.

Ori: Blind Forest came out looking like a standard visual novel game, but pulled a bait and switch when the small glowing creature turned out to be the protagonist, and the developers clearly seem to have mastered the art of telling a story without words. The trailer alone turns Last Guardien-tier sad near the end. It actually looks really solid.

Assassin's Creed started out average, with the fandom speculation that we would see the French Revolution getting a solid confirmation. However, this moved from 'eh' to 'YES' when they showed off the dedicated co-op mechanic that allows you and your friends to participate in the same missions side-by-side. Each of the four playable assassins seems to have their own iconic color scheme and weapon of choice, though whether that can be customized remains to be seen. The scene at the end when the four of them surrounded the assassination target was the best part of the whole trailer. This shows that Ubisoft didn't run out of tricks after they made functional ships. They evolved the gameplay yet again, and in a fundamental manner.

Evolve continues to look amazing, with the second confirmed monster being some sort of bewinged Lightning Cthulhu that appears to be more caster-like and AoE centric, as opposed to the melee fury of the first monster. I'm holding out hope that there's a third monster that is stealth-based and has ice powers, as that would complete the dual-trinities of Fire-Ice-Lightning and Tank-Caster-Rogue. Also, one of the class variations (Tracker?) seems to come with an armored tracking dog as their special gear, which is neat.

Scalebound is Platinum Studios combining Pokemon, Monster Hunter, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kamen Rider in a bid to cure erectile dysfunction once and for all, and it may very well have worked. The only bad thing about this game being that it is confirmed as an Xbox One Exclusive, so no PC, PS4, or WiiU ports for you.

The Witcher 3 is on full display, with their developers apparently having, wisely, in my opinion, seen Dragon's Dogma and gone "That. That right there. That's where we need to be, but with more of that." It's a full-on sandbox incarnation of The Witcher, where events proc randomly in the world and large monsters must be ambushed, injured, and then tracked across the land using your supernatural Witcher senses so they can be run down and finished off. The devs confirmed that while the events are random, there are deliberate 'hot spots' where multiple things can occur at once, such as a wounded monster that you injured earlier and are tracking charging head-long into a fight between bandits and local militia, which is intended to add spice to the game's encounter system. This looks good enough that I'm tempted to pre-order, and I'm not someone who pre-orders.

The very fact that Crackdown 3 exists is itself cause for celebration. The fact that it seems to have taken some cues from graphic novels and more 'adult' animated styles, neither truly cartoonish, cell-shaded, or photo realistic, but adopting a comfortable balance between the three, serves to make it look better than ever. Realtime has their work cut out for them, as many have said, myself included, that Saints Row IV was the Crackdown that Crackdown 2 should have been. Volition nailed the superpowered protagonist formula that Realtime and various 'Game of the Movie' superhero games started, and I would consider Saints Row IV the game to beat for providing a fun environment that gives you superpowers and ways to use them. While Crackdown obviously can't beat Saints Row in zanyness, they will have to beat them in providing the best superhero experience, as Saints Row definitely set the high water mark for that.

And of course, we finally get to Sunset Overdrive, a third-person dynamic movement-centric free-roam shooting game with bright colors that breaks the fourth wall, doesn't take itself remotely seriously, has massive EIGHT MAN co-op support, and actively and constantly takes a piss at every gritty, cover-based, dark and serious first-person shooter ever made. In a constant lineup of Wolverines and Captain Americas, somebody finally gave us a Deadpool. It's about fucking time. Because remember, games are supposed to be fun. And this looks really fun.

 

Raine. Sources for all the Halo related news, please.

 

You motherfucker, now you made me want an Xbox jut to play Scalebound. And I sure hope so about Withcer and Dragon's Dogma, ridiculous story aside, that game had the most big boss battles I ever played. Winning against a Drake was one of the best moments in my gaming life.

And I thought EA was the cumulation of all evil in video game industry. Microsoft is here t compete.

Oh, and that IGN comment. You said everything I wanted to say, but obviously better.

 

I wouldn't expect the Halo collection to be as exorbitantly priced as you suggest, Raine. I thought it'd be something like 60$, 90$ at most. No one buys games for more than that, right? (Excluding DLC bought over time, of course.)
But if Msoft did just remove the servers for the other Halos, that's massively dick.
I hated having to watch the IGN stream, since Twitch fucked up while there were over 200k+ people watching.

 

In Australia, AAA games tend to launch at about $110. On console at least; they're a bit cheaper for PC.

 

Since when? I buy all my games digitally - overpriced for the convenience - and at most have paid 100.

If you buy hard copies, you can still pick up brand new games for 60-80. Stop shopping at EB, is all I can say, I guess.

I bought the Last of Us (probably my last physical purchase) for sixty bucks at Big W.

 

In Poland, AAA PC titles tend to launch at prices oscilating around 100-120 zlotys, which translates into around 40-ish dollars (I'm talking basic versions, no deluxe/collector's editions) although really 'big' titles can get a price bump. I picked up the barebones ME3 version for a third of that when I got it in February 2013, so a year after the premiere. Seems pretty cheap in comparison, although I guess average wages would need to be compared as well for any of that to have merit.

 

Haha, I work at EB. GTA V as the most recent example of a high priced game.

 

Are you being serious. The graphics are already PC melting and you'd like it to be more?

I think you saw a bad quality video of the game to make you think they need more graphics.

 

I think he's forgetting that the game was shown on a console, thus limited by its already outdated hardware, and not a PC.