Very few surprises, very little enthusiasm
Three platform-holder conferences which ranged from uneventful at best to downright depressing in the case of you-know-who. Some decent third party games, but very little we hadn't already seen. Enough eight-year-old-girl-focused game ranges with 'z' in the title to sink Godzilla. All these things and less combined to make E3 '08 a turgid excitement-vacuum which no-one looked to be taking seriously.
Journalists seemed to drift along on a slow-moving stream of boredom, paddling with oars fashioned from the purest "Meh". And worse, the exhibitors themselves just didn't seem to care. Capcom dedicated its entire conference to the Lost Planet movie. Miyamoto disregarded the show as unimportant for core game announcements. Microsoft held back on unveiling a frickin' Bungie Halo game because it didn't seem necessary given the bland competition. And Kaz Hirai didn't even bother turning up. Apathy surrounded, penetrated and bound the show like the very Force itself, and you'd have had trouble filling the gap between expectation and reality with a (LittleBig) planet.
EA actually looks like a good prospect for once
Okay, so this one was a bit of a surprise. EA has of course been steadily improving its in-house and publishing output over the last year or so, but just check out the quality and diversity of the current line-up. Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Spore, Dragon Age: Origins, Mercenaries 2, Rock Band 2, Crysis: Warhead, Valve's Left 4 Dead, id's Rage and a KOTOR MMO, all coming from the former McDonald's of videogames? Unthinkable! We're starting to feel a little dirty just typing this, so we're going to move swiftly on.
Above: Hands up who would have seen this coming a few years ago.
Third-party Wii developers seem to be getting their act together just in time for Nintendo to lose the plot
Madworld, The Conduit, Dead Rising, Deadly Creatures, Spore, Fatal Frame IV and Mushroom Men are all coming for the Wii. Reggie take note, these are the games putting smiles on our faces. Your moribund excretion of nonsensical, happy-fun-time pap-core just drove us perilously close to heroin abuse.
Next-gen continues to be brown and grey
Fairly self-explanatory. If games can create any kind of reality for us to enjoy, why are we still obsessed with the visual dirge of a nigh-monochrome gritty realism which isn't even that realistic if you take the time to look out of a window?
