E3 2012: The Year of Disappointment

Every year E3 kicks off the gaming convention madness with giant announcements, jaw dropping conferences and a plethora of new titles to be released in the coming year. For several years E3 was the benchmark to which many conventions aspired to be, set in sunny LA with hundreds of thousands of guests flooded E3 in anticipation of what was to come but a few years back E3 closed its doors to the public, shattering the dreams of many and alienating those who have supported gaming for years in favour of journalists and other developers.

Since then E3 has been a mixed bag of announcements ranging from the extremely out of date Mr Caffeine, the booing of AT&T and the excitement that followed after the Vita was announced. Much like your taste in games the conference has always been a hit and miss based on your preference although there was always something there that had your blood racing.

Unfortunately I struggled to find anything that left me breathless. Many of the games announced were sequels, prequels or just plain ass. Yes there were the odd one or two diamonds in the rough but it is hard to keep such high spirits after spending hours rolling around in filth.

It seems that even the greatest of franchises did not believe in this year’s E3 to the point that Halo 4, the Gears prequel and many others made announcements in the week or so before the show. If Microsoft cannot be backed by their own poster boy then why bother with such an illustrious event. On the PS3 front it was very disheartening with no news from the team working on The Last Guardian (even though Sony assure the fans that it will appear I find it harder to believe by the day) and what looks like a Super Smash Bros rip off on the horizon for Sony there was very little to look forward to. Hell even Netherrealm’s new fighting game surfaced the week prior to E3.

As for the nintendo conference we were promised 23 games and well we did see these games but they were either already on the market of were passed over so quickly in montages it was very hard to judge if they had actually met this quota. There was of course a new Mario game and the announcement of some cool new online features on the Nintendo side of things but it was largely underwhelming and the big announcements that were made were almost expected with a new consoles.

In a perfect world all these developers, excluding Nintendo are hiding their best for the new consoles they have stashed away in their evil headquarters awaiting to unleash the behemoths of gaming on the unsuspecting public at the next major conference. Although I can’t quite help thinking this is nothing but a pipe dream.

Hopefully there will be an upturn in next year’s conference with the announcements of some new and impressive IPs from both sides, it could be time for Kratos to hang up the gauntlet, Baird to drop the Lancer and the covenant to get a rest.

After all is said and done there are some awesome titles out this year and in spite of the delays of Bioshock Infinite we still have Borderlands 2, Persona 4 Arena, Assassins Creed 3, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 all to look forward too. And after E3 all the speculation on Watchdogs, The Last of Us and a few others to keep us all going until next year. Failing that we can always hope for more big announcements at Eurogamer, Tokyo Games Show and all the others.