25,363 community articles
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I talked at length last Summaries about how exhausting E3 week can be, whether you're covering the event professionally like the Great Big Balls of Fire Boys, or staying up late to watch the night shows or (if you're particularly masochistic) writing a daily blog series concurrently. Since it's been occupying all my waking moments the past week, I might as well actually talk about the event som...
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Every year at E3, there are shorter conferences and a lot of little previews of games that can't add up to a full article but are still worth mentioning so let's talk about the briefer briefings and lower-key show floor games of E3 2018. Devolver Digital You could probably write the number of people who were impressed with Devolver's 2017 conference on one hand, but I'd be on that list. Last ye...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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I may have recently put myself down for compiling an E3 watchlist last year , but that won't stop me from doing it all again. After all, can you really award yourself the coveted "gamer" status if you don't pointlessly list the games at E3? I think not. This year, I tried to limit my excitement so my list would be full of things I actually play. And while only a handful of games grabbed my atte...
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E3 might've been a major timesink this week, but nothing stops Indie Game of the Week consarnit. Today's game is Scrap Garden from Flazm (best known for their Train Valley series), released in 2016, which follows a little robot that could on his journey to restore his mechanical civilization after something went awry as he was undergoing maintenance. As one of the last robots to be powered by a...
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The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...
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This is it. After six days, seven conferences, and 200 trailers uploaded to Giant Bomb ( thanks Marino ), the end of E3 is in sight. It's certainly been a harrowing week, though if past events are anything to go by tonight's live shows will probably be the most harrowing yet, to our sanity if nothing else. That's why we're (figuratively, but if you want to do this at home no-one's stopping you)...
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E3 is raging on around our ears, but we're safely ensconced in this, our No-E3s Cushion Fort. It might be drafty, it might have no structural integrity, and Mom says we can't have any more snacks until after dinner, but at least it's a chill place where we can hang out and play Game Boy until it's time to put the sofa back together (or, in the case of GB's sofa, fix its janky-ass legs before it...
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Nintendo's press conference this year looked a lot like Bethesda's for the last few years . Instead of having a whole platter of games to set down in front of us, they had a few snacks and then one big course. The company filling up the majority of their briefing with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate this year is comparable to the way Bethesda have wallpapered over their pressers with plenty of Fallo...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Ubisoft's conference on Monday night was all the richer for not rushing through their upcoming catalogue and letting us linger on the footage and news of their games. It sat in stark contrast to the Microsoft presentation in which Phil Spencer boasted about squeezing fifty video games in a single ninety-minute slot like someone trying to stuff their whole wardrobe into a tiny suitcase. You migh...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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"Enjoy E3 or die in obscurity!" We've all been told that from time to time. But what if I offered an alternative? An alternative to E3? Doesn't that sound nice? Certainly nicer than crowding together inside a stuffy fake church hall, I'd bet. That's what we're doing here, in this Alternative to E3 series that - for 2018 at least - is looking at various "randomizer" hacks to see how fun it might...
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There was no one presentation during the Ubisoft conference that blew me away like the Sea of Solitude speech in EA's briefing or the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer in Microsoft's presser , but Ubisoft may have put on my favourite show so far. When the publisher had a game they wanted to talk about, they mostly made sure we saw footage of that game or had gotten to play a version of it elsewhere. They...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Ubisoft is the McDonalds of developers. All of their games are good, but never exciting. Occasionally they have a very good offering (Assassins Creed: Origins), but at the end of the day most of their products are very similar. This is generally fine, but I want something more out of them. I did not get something more with this press conference. But I did get to see a ton of games that I’ll pro...
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I was so annoyed that the opening and closing speeches of Microsoft's conference made all these pretentious declarations about the games on display which were not accurate to the trailers and demos we saw, but Bethesda provides an example of how to use such moments to give your audience something more concrete to grab on to. They didn't bookend their press conference with abstract and unrealist...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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The movie that brought me into the Appleseed universe. *This Appleseed movie review is the second of four that I will be doing for the month. For a small primer on the comic series, check out my Appleseed Month announcement here * My first memories of this Appleseed movie are hazy at best. I remembered that I was roughly ten and that I first watched it in Cantonese. It had robots, explosions, a...
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Hey paizanos, and welcome back to your oasis away from the triple threat of E3 briefings due to start earlier today. I'm still tinkering around with randomizers over here, having caught the non-indigenous procedural generation bug after playing through A Link to the Past with all its scrambled treasures. Be sure to check that out if you're still not copacetic on what a randomizer is or entails....
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I didn't enjoy Microsoft's conference last year as much as the majority of the community seemed to. They leaned into the hardware porn of the Xbox One X specs and spent too much time rallying consumer support based on brand names and recognisable characters. By attempting to hype up announcements to unreasonable levels, the publisher made their claims seem overblown, and they put too much empha...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Both the publishing arm and developments studios of Bethesda have had sound track records in recent memory. Churning out plenty of critically acclaimed games, it is unsurprising that most of their press conferences stuck to their roots. Wait… What?! You’re telling me the new Fallout is an always online survival game? Pardon me, B.J. Blaskowitz isn’t the playable character in the new Wolfenstein...
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We're another day closer to the end of E3. Doesn't that sound swell? I mean, sure, it's really only just started, but there's no reason we can't be optimistic about it. Talking of optimism, what's more friendly and inviting than a gothic castle full of demons? Not a whole lot, is what. The Week of the Randomizers continues today with Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, perhaps the second best of the I...
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I am a PC and Xbox gamer. When I first purchased by Xbox 2 years ago, the Masterchief Collection, Gears of War and the controller form were driving factors. Since my purchase, I’m not sure there has been any large exclusives aside from Halo Wars 2. As the platform has improved massively over the last year, going into this Microsoft show I was looking for one thing, and one thing alone – games....
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Hey. I’m going to write about E3! EA kicked of the press conference lineup with a relatively sterile, unexciting, but acceptable show. Battlefield games make for great openers to a conference. The destruction, explosions and haven’t lost their ability to leave me impressed, and I must admit I drooled a tiny bit when I saw a pile of snow roll down the roof of a collapsing house. But there really...
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Navigating art and entertainment means being critical of it and being critical of E3 means not just reviewing the press conferences as they are streamed but also looking at how accurately the press conferences of the past portrayed the products and services they were selling. If we don't stay diligent about this, it allows these companies to sell us a bill of goods every E3. I thought EA's pres...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Welcome, E3 asylum seekers, to a new edition of Mento's Alternative to E3 series. This is Your Sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle going on in the LA Convention Center, or at least the hustle and bustle that's due to start three days from now, hence the slightly weird numbering for these days. Thanks EA. To pass the blissful time away from all that noise, I'm going to be checking out a ga...
