E3 2015 Summary

E3 2015. You wouldn't be here unless you knew what it was so I'm cutting the shit and getting right to it. Only talking about Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo in detail - everything else is pretty self-explanatory.

Microsoft- It seems to me that Phil Spencer, head of XBOX, is really proud to be part of a company that makes tons of money without doing any work. To be honest, I don't blame him. It's not his fault that Microsoft continues make money selling garbage games and crap machines, it's YOURS. Okay look. It's true that I am bias against Microsoft, but I gave them so many chances! Red Ring of Death outbreak early in the 360's life: they shipped out thousands of machines already on death row, and I forgave them because no one had ever seen anything like that before. But what happened 6 years later? Disc trays don't open because the machine is constructed from cheap parts, internal hard drives malfunction with no way to access them, discs that are rendered unreadable anytime someone so much as sneezes towards the machine. By making fragile machines and by sequelizing the shit out of games that are already pretty shitty to begin with, Microsoft has continued to prove to me that they aren't as loyal to their players as their players are to them.

So E3 2015 was the last chance I was prepared to give them.

What modern gamers have to understand is the following: video game making technology has progressed phenomenally since Pong, the first video game, was released in 1972. Contrarily, what has hardly progressed at all is our ability to understand what makes a video game fun. We have vague ideas of what people like to see in games, based off of trends, patterns, and statistics, but at the end of the day, only an elite group of specialists have the ability to be able to look at a game and identify exactly what it is about that game that makes it special. These people are called "artists". Video games are art, and like all great art, their beauty stems from originality. And there was fucking nothing original about any of the games or concepts shown in Microsoft's presentation at E3 2015. Nothing that showed me Microsoft gave a shit about what real gamers want. I saw countless sequels of franchises that are now well over 10 years old, maybe 2 or 3 original IP's which looked uninspired or boring, and needless backwards compatibility.

The Xbox One now has the ability to play games that I already have the ability to play, giving the Xbox One the ability to play games I got so bored with that I decided to buy a new system.

Everybody shit their fucking pants about the fact that the Xbone is now able to play 360 games, but I already have the fucking ability to do that with both of the Xbox 360s in my house that I never touch! I'm not listing the games they announced, but suffice is to say that if you would exchange $400 in order to gain the ability to play the same games you've been playing for the last 8 years or to play uninspired cash-cow fucking sequels of those games, then you are exactly the kind of fuck who is stunting the evolution of the video game industry and ruining it for everybody else.

Sony- SONY seems to understand what I've said about Microsoft. While Microsoft seems to be content making easy money selling what would be the equivalent of video game fast-food, something that's easy to access, cost efficient to produce, and appealing to the greatest quantity of people, SONY runs every single 4 and 5 star restaurant in the industry. Square, Ubisoft, and EA seem to be pretty loyal to Sony this time of year, and with Naughty Dog and Team ICO under their belt as well, one has to wonder what more SONY could possibly need in order to secure its place as the victor in this console war. Of course, though, we are hear to talk about games, and holy cow-fucking shit did the games Sony discuss look incredible. The Last Guardian, No Man's Sky, Dreams, Horizon: Zero Dawn: all beautiful games with striking and inspired originality. Now to be fair, there were many remasterings and remakes announced as well, and while I do think that it is unacceptable to repackage and sell an old game for a quick buck, I consider myself swift to remind everyone that they would stop making remasters if you would stop buying them.

Two years ago, the PS4 was the best choice of this generation as a result of it not being the Xbox One. This year, PS4 is the better choice because it simply has the most interesting and unique games.

Nintendo- Who even fucking cares at this point. Nintendo's presentation was nothing short of insulting. It takes a lot of guts to defend Nintendo nowadays, but E3 Nintendo this year gave fans absolutely no reason to continue to do so. Substitute spin-offs of franchises we once loved, and more Skylanders. To be fair, Star Fox looked awesome, but its demo failed to address the concern most gamers have had about it since it was announced - do rail shooters belong in the environment of modern gaming? Still nobody knows. More fairness - unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo releases information on many of their games at a time several times during the year in the form of Nintendo Directs, so this atrocity of an E3 performance does have a chance to be undone by a killer Nintendo Direct later in the year, but still. Finally, the unique thing about Nintendo fans is that when they buy a new Nintendo console, they're in the position of knowing exactly what they're getting themselves into. New Mario, Zelda, some new IP, Starfox, Pikmin, etc. Everyone who ever had any interest in the Wii U already has one, so it's not like anyone needed this E3 to convince them that Nintendo was the way to go, it was just disappointing because Nintendo fans really just have no reason to continue to support Nintendo anymore. We already knew about every good game Nintendo is releasing, and the ones we didn't know about we would have preferred to stay that way.