T w e n t y S i d e d

Like I said at the end of my E3 coverage, Steam NEXT Fest features a ton of playable demos. So I decided I’d play a few of them and offer my reaction. I spent a bunch of page space responding to the AAA trailers that the big publishers put out, so it seems only fair that I should give some attention to the hardworking indie teams that went to the time and trouble of putting together a playable demo here in the year of our Lord, twenty hundred and twenty-one. I thought demos were all but extinct, and if developers are going to bring them back then we ought to reward them with our attention.

Then again, maybe my attention isn’t that great of a reward. I am by nature relentlessly picky, insufferably critical, and tragically jaded. When you put out some sort of trailer or public demo, then you’re probably looking for unconditional fanboy gushing, not the critique of an aging, cantankerous programmer. 

This is particularly true when my response is generally negative, which is the case for…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Next Fest 2021 Pt1: Lake”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

And so we end E3 week with a final catch-all post designed to round up the smaller presentations. Note that I won’t be covering the Nintendo stuff at all. I’m just not keyed into Nintendo’s stuff and so I’m not going to have anything useful to say. 

Same goes for Capcom, although I’m willing to bet Chris will have some thoughts on that stuff at some point, if you’re following him.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2021 Part 4: And the Rest…”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Like I said in the previous post, the Xbox show is not a double act featuring both Xbox and Bethesda. Here is the second half of the Xbox presentation…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2021 Part 3: Still More Xbox”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In years past, Bethesda and Microsoft had separate shows. But this year Microsoft acquired Bethesda for 7.5 billion. So the two presentations were merged. Great. I already get Pete Hines and Phil Spencer mixed up all the time, and now they’re in the same presentation. Like, I think it took me one or two years of E3 before I realized these were two different guys.

(It’s not that they look all that much alike. They’re just two nondescript dudes of medium build in corporate casual dress that come out and recite boilerplate corporate copy before a series of trailers. They don’t literally look like each other, but they’re sort of generic and forgettable. So when I see the second one, I can’t remember if he matches the face I saw earlier.)

It’s really interesting that they lead off the show with Todd Howard from Bethesda instead of having an Xbox personality show us the latest Halo. Microsoft is evidently very proud of their acquisition. 

Anyway, I’m just going to go through the entire show and comment on everything in order… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2021 Part 2: Xbox (But really Bethesda)”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I realize the pandemic has been horrible, painful, and endlessly annoying, but I really like what it’s done for our premiere videogame trade show. Presentations are so much smoother now that publishers are focusing on the home audience rather than marketing to a crowd of hungover, overworked, jet-lagged journalists who are all fighting for a wi-fi signal in a deafening convention center. 

It’s nice that presenters can get their requisite boilerplate “games are important” prattle out of the way without stopping for applause every ten seconds. The stream remains focused on the trailers I’m trying to watch and doesn’t keep cutting back to a convention hall of attendees that don’t matter to me. I think the presenters feel a little less pressure since they’re not looking out over a sea of faces, which means they’re a little more composed and a lot less wooden. 

Old E3 was designed for a world before social media. A world where you needed to market to journalists, and then those journalists would write magazine articles, and then next month those articles would reach the intended audience. Now the intended audience can view your marketing directly, in real time. 

I hope we keep doing things this way, even when/if we’ve given COVID the shove. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2021 Part 1: Ubisoft’s Cavalcade of Cringe”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.