Sorry, guys! We were just too busy watching E3 these last couple of days to get ANY Blaster Nation work done. You could probably tell that we're pretty big into video games, so this was like Christmas for us. Even back before we were doing webcomics full-time, I would take off work just to stay at home with Leslie and watch E3 with her. This shit's super important to us, so forgive us for the late page. Instead, I'll be blogging about what I thought about the games we saw! This is going to be a really long-ass blog post, so if you'd rather skim to the parts you care about, just CTRL+F the game you liked or hated at E3.

So.

Shenmue 3.

I never expected to actually cry over a video game announcement, but there I was, literally fucking breathless with tears streaming down my face from overwhelming joy. Shenmue was such an important game to me growing up. It's something I've replayed constantly throughout my life, finding new things every single playthrough. Both Shenmue 1 and 2 are some of the finest, well-crafted, highly-detailed game worlds to this day, and I never thought I'd ever see a third game come to life. But here we are, now living in a world in which Shenmue 3 is a reality. Am I bummed that it's a Kickstarter game? Yes. Do I have doubts that it won't live up to expectation, or that they might fail to deliver like so many other gaming Kickstarters? Of course. But for now, I'm just so happy that Yu Suzuki, a true goddamn gaming legend, gets to finish a story he's wanted to tell for over 17 years now. For now, I can put aside my doubts and support a game I've been waiting most of my life to see. I hope you can too.

Sony delivered one of the most magical fucking E3s I have ever seen in my life. With Nintendo, you expect them to occasionally bring out an old franchise or a new twist. You expect a new Mario or a new Zelda or a new Smash Bros. sometime soon. But Sony brought fucking dreams to life. A Final Fantasy VII remake. The Last Guardian, back from the dead. Co-producing Shenmue III. Three fucking miracles announced almost in a fucking row. Not only that, but Horizon: Zero Dawn looks fun as hell, easily the most promising new IP I've seen at the conference. If they deliver anything close to what they premiered, I'm down. Hell, even Street Fighter V is shaping up to be good, they're actually starting to sell me on it. With all these games, Sony's conference alone won E3, and delivered what might as well be the best conference in E3 history.

Not only did the other companies fail to meet the bar Sony set, but they didn't even come close. Every other conference this year felt like a fucking chore. Even Nintendo, with their muppets and charm, couldn't hold a candle to Sony this year. Honestly, they may have been one of the worst offenders this year, but let's talk about the good stuff Nintendo announced.

Star Fox Zero looks great. I love the return to the N64-style. The puppets, the level design, the way they animate, everything. I hated the style and the furry drama of the Gamecube and DS games so much, so it's great to see them remember what made Star Fox SNES and 64 so great and memorable in the first place. Also, Platinum is working on it, so there's practically no way it can be bad. The new Zelda for 3DS also looks fun, and it might be the first multiplayer Zelda game I actually bother with. The Nintendo World Championship was also surprisingly fun and Mario Maker has quickly jumped to a must-buy for me.

That's it. Everything else was either boring as hell or a total fucking slap in the face for any fan waiting for a true sequel to their favorite franchises. While many people (including me) were waiting to see a full-fledged Wii U Animal Crossing game, Nintendo delivered two Animal Crossing titles that were only Animal Crossing in name: one being a home decorating shovelware title and the other being a goddamn Amiibo 8-pack collection with an AC-based board game thrown in to justify buying the toys. I can't believe they thought this was a good idea, but then they showed off an even worse idea with their new Metroid. And by Metroid, I mean clearly an original IP that they knew wouldn't sell without name recognition, so the Metroid title was slapped on the cover. The Blastball segment was revealed at the Nintendo World Championship to absolutely no applause, and rightfully so. Blastball was boring as shit. Slow, ugly, and uninteresting. It boggles my mind that Nintendo thought a game about robots weakly shooting a slow-moving ball across the floor would be a fun game, and these are the guys that made squids painting a floor fun. If Blastball was faster and crazier, it might be great, but even the fully-charged power shots barely move the ball across the arena. Almost all of the World Championship footage were players slowly grinding the ball against the wall, all huddled around shooting at it while it barely moved. The other half of the Metroid game, Federation Whatever, is barely even worth mentioning by me or even by Nintendo apparently. We barely saw any of it, but there's no Samus, there's no exploration, there's nothing hardly resembling Metroid, so fuck it. The rest of the conference was things we've already seen, Amiibos, and a whole lot of Mario celebrating, so there's not much else to say other than I'm starting to get sick of Amiibo integration in fucking everything. Mario Maker was the last thing that needed Amiibos, and I'd rather it have stuck to a celebration of Mario than shoehorning Amiibos to swap Mario with Wii Fit Trainer or whatever.

Microsoft's conference was also boring and safe and there's honestly nothing I liked there. I didn't like the last Tomb Raider reboot and the sequel to it isn't selling me either, doubling down on "cinematic" gameplay and QTEs. I hate the modern trend of gameplay reveals just have players walking along as scripted sequences happen in the background, completely outside of the player's interaction. Microsoft somehow managed to make Gears of War boring as well. Though I've never really LOVED the Gears of War games, I thought the co-op aspect was well done and I appreciated how ridiculously macho the world was. This was a world of chainsaw-guns, giant worms, football-stars-turned-soldiers, and orbital laser strike guns were a common weapon. The new Gears of War is dark, dull, and feels a bit too inspired by Last of Us. I honestly can't remember what else Microsoft had, so I'm going to skip to the next one.

Presentation-wise, Square-Enix was heavy on words and felt incredibly amateurish, but they managed to pull out some surprises and showed off some fun-looking games. I loved Just Cause 2, and Just Cause 3 looks like a great sequel with a lot of potential for crazyness. Kingdom Hearts 3 is also shaping up nicely, though I never really cared much for the series. I'll probably end up skipping it, but I'm glad it looks good for the fans. That one Final Fantasy spin-off was cute as hell and I'm interested to see how that ends up. And of course, the biggest surprise was a new Nier game handled by Platinum. I've only heard good things about Nier (sans the combat), and I love its soundtrack, so I'm really excited to get into this series now. There was also a Star Ocean announcement but I've only heard and seen really stupid things from the Star Ocean games. I've heard 2 was good, but man, I just don't care enough. 

On the not-Japanese side of Square-Enix, I'm also cautiously optimistic about Deus Ex and Hitman. From what I've read from the developers on Hitman, they recognized that their last game, Hitman: Absolution, was flawed as hell and I'm glad to see them admit their faults. I've made no qualms about how much I hated damn near everything about Absolution, from the level design to the characterization and plot, so I'd love to see a return to form for Hitman. That said, I have no idea what the new Hitman game is supposed to be. Rather than try to make the consumer understand what they're making, the PR for the new Hitman game decided to trap us in a labyrinth of buzzwords. Is it an early-access Hitman game where they'll slowly release levels over time? Is it some sort of single-player Hitman MMO with one-time events and shit? I don't fucking know. I'm also a little worried about the new Deus Ex game, since almost all they've shown is Adam Jensen mowing down hundreds with his SICK ROBO-GUNS. Deus Ex 1 was not really a first-person shooter. Rather, it used the framing of a first-person shooter as a means to an end. While you had access to guns, they always emphasized that you had other options, whether you wanted to sneak through, use your augmented agility to find alternate routes, or even sometimes just straight up talk your way through. It wasn't a game that treated you like an idiot, and even Human Revolution seemed to get that. But all the promotional footage I've seen advertises Deus Ex as just another sci-fi FPS, and that worries me. I saw one small segment at the PC conference of a sneaking section (that quickly turned into a shootout), so at least there's that.

Oh, right, that PC conference. Two and a half hours of my life that I'll never get back with absolutely nothing of any value to talk about. Let's just try our best to forget about it as soon as possible. At the very least, EA showed some footage of Battlefront, and it doesn't quite look like the Battlefield re-skin I thought it would be. It looks actually kind of fun! I honestly can't remember much from Ubisoft's conference other than that Just Cause game that they're trying to pass off as Ghost Recon. I guess there was probably a new Assassin's Creed announcement or something. Who cares.

Last on my conference list is Bethesda with their two games. I see a lot of people complaining that Doom looks too slow-paced to be a Doom game, but honestly, I'm not too concerned. I've got a slight modicum of faith in id Software even if I don't particularly like how console-influenced this game looks. That slow-ass weapon wheel is clearly made for consoles, but at least there's a full arsenal and not some two-weapon bullshit. I'm sure the PC version will just use number keys for weapon selection, so no problem there. Outside of the chainsaw executions, all the melee finishers looked quick enough to not interfere with gameplay much. I dunno, I guess I just have a bit more hope that it'll be fun than I do for Fallout 4.

I see so much hope for Fallout 4, and I wish I could be one of those people, but fuck, everything I saw about Fallout 4 has me worried. For one, Bethesda regularly releases broken, unfinished, bug-ridden, barely playable games. Now they come out and tell me that despite still not figuring out how to make an open-world sandbox game without a million bugs hindering your progress, they've managed to put in base-building tower-defense and sims elements that "just work"? I'm calling so much bullshit on that. There's no way any of that shit can work as advertised unless their new game engine is a fucking dream machine.

I also have some serious concerns about the story. Mainly, I REALLY don't like how they handled character creation in this game. One aspect I really loved about Fallout: New Vegas was how much of a blank slate your player character was. The only bit of backstory you were given was "You're a mailman". You could then inject any history or background into your character as you saw fit. You could even mod yourself to be a ghoul, and it worked with the canon because there was nothing contrary to the idea. Now, Fallout 4 establishes that you're a one half of a married couple with a child, living in a beautiful suburb with your own house. Wanted your character to be gay? A bachelor/bachelorette turned mercenary? A war vet surviving in the new world? Literally anything but one half of a well-off nuclear family? Too bad. Your character is also fully-voiced, constantly blurting out their inner thoughts to remind you that you're not this character, whereas past Fallout games were all about immersing yourself into this role. Even worse is that there's only one voice for each gender, so no matter what, you're just going to sound like a white guy or white girl. Even the Saints Row games gave you options for your voice, even going so far as to let you change the bass and pitch in SR4. One feature that I loved was how intelligence affected your speech in past Fallout games (and New Vegas. This feature was absent in 3, the game Bethesda personally worked on). If you had 1 intelligence, you spoke like a caveman, and NPCs reacted to your stupidity. That's just one example of how in the original games, your stats affected the way your character could act. Something tells me that with these fully-voiced player characters, nothing like that is ever going to happen. No matter what your stats are, they won't affect how your character acts. Not only that, but it seems they dumbed down speech to the point where you now have a dialogue wheel with a maximum of four options. In a franchise where talking your way out of situations was a legit strategy, I can't imagine how you can manage that with only four paraphrased options. It feels streamlined to the point where your role in a conversation matters less than it ever has before. I'll still end up giving the game a try at some point (though not on day one, I'm not that gullible), but fuck, I've been burned before and I'm seeing all the same signs that made me hate Fallout 3.

Last on my list is the Metal Gear Solid V trailer, which was FUCKING AMAZING JESUS CHRIST I'M SO HYPED FOR THAT GAME. If this is truly Kojima's last E3 trailer ever, he went out on a high note. I'm more pumped for Phantom Pain than ever now, and I can't wait for Kojima to take me on a fucking ride. I'm not going to spoil anything for you, just go watch. 

PHEW. Okay, this has to be my longest blog post ever. If you actually managed to read it this far...thanks! We'll have a real comic up for you on Friday, as well as some RC comics this weekend. Whether you like or dislike what I had to say about E3, I think we can all agree that E3 is a magical time of the year worth geeking out over. 

Thank you so much! See you on Friday!