The Tip Top Ten of E3

Well, E3’s all over (including the shouting) and by and large it was a pretty good bash, especially compared to last year’s table-top/car-boot sale thing. There was a shocking amount of stuff up for perusal, so much so that I could barely bring myself to check the RSS feeds at one point – that “1000+ articles unread” indicator was just taunting me. But at the end of the day… there have to be winners! And these are mine – an alphabetically-ordered list of the ten most exciting games from last week’s coverage. You will probably disagree, but hey – this is my song! 🙂

E3 Conferences: Sony

And so finally we came to Sony. Last of the big three and with promises of ‘big things’, I sat down to watch hoping that not everything had leaked ahead of time. Luckily it hadn’t, and Sony actually surprised by presenting a very decent (if over-long) show and almost (but not quite) producing that much-rumoured ‘megaton’ that people always claim will be coming pretty much every time there’s an event.

E3 Conferences: Nintendo

To say I wasn’t expecting much from Nintendo at E3 is possibly the understatement of the year – I wasn’t expecting anything from Nintendo at E3, not for me, anyway. We may have a full complement of Nintendo machines at Chez Blerk, but I tend to spend very little time with them due to a conflict of interests between me and the ‘rich guys’. That said, last year’s conference was famous for being ‘diabolical beyond belief’, so there was a certain amount of car-crash fascination which lead me to look forward to this year. Could they surprise me? Actually, they did.

E3 Conferences: Microsoft

Well, that’s it all over for Microsoft and judging by internet reaction they appear to have pushed pretty much all of the right buttons – press and forumites alike seem very pleased with what they had to offer. Myself, I can’t help but feel a slight twinge of disappointment – considering how little Microsoft has announced so far this year, I was sort of expecting to see almost the entire conference given over to ‘brand new’ first or second-party stuff. But maybe that’s just me.

PSP Go…ing to hurt your hands.

Oh my! Somebody screws up and releases all the info early and we all knew about it already anyway, but… seriously, Sony – what were you thinking when you placed that analogue nub? That looks about as comfortable as… er… something that’s really uncomfortable. A shame too, because the machine itself looks quite cute and the download-only thing is actually fairly appealing for a handheld.

The all new (and not entirely serious) E3 Prediction-o-tron

I’ve been on my holidays and when I come back, what do I find? E3’s right on top of us! Gadzooks!

I always get stupidly excited about shows (specifically E3) and then ultimately end up bored and disappointed because hardly anything new gets announced. This year seems like it could be different, though – there’s plenty of rumour flying about and not very much concrete info. Perhaps with the newly zombified E3 rising from its grave we might just get a bit of extra effort thrown in there… I live in hope.

I’m going to be keeping an eye on what’s going on and posting an occasional opinion and then following up the show with a ‘best of’ rant, but in the meantime I did some predictions for VG247’s forum thread, so I thought I’d repost them here in a slightly expanded form so that you can all laugh at me later when I completely miss the mark. 🙂