It’s June, and that means it’s time for E3.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo has, traditionally, been one of the biggest weeks of the year for the video game industry. The perfect time for publishers to make big announcements and put out trailers to generate hype for their upcoming titles.
But there is no E3 this year, making it the second time the event has been canceled since the COVID-19 pandemic. While last year, the Entertainment Software Association put on a virtual only E3, this year the whole shebang was scrapped.
Yet the spirit of E3 seems to be living on as publishers, developers, and games media has decided to march on with a hodgepodge of shows. Both Sony and Microsoft have put out presentations showcasing their upcoming offerings.. Geoff Keeley put on the mid-year counterpart to December’s Game Awards with Summer Game Fest. The “PC Gaming Show”, an E3 staple, went on as though nothing had changed. And there’s even rumor of a Nintendo Direct coming up at the end of the month.
In between, developers big and small are vying for attention with their own showings.
I would say you can hardly tell that E3 has been canceled at all, but without one umbrella to put all of these presentations under it’s actually become quite difficult to keep track of who is showing what.
Still, I’ve managed to find some highlights, so here’s a handful of the titles that have stood out to me thus far.
Street Fighter 6
The standard bearer of 2D fighters is ready to move on to its first new iteration since 2016. “Street Fighter 6” will have new characters, new mechanics, and new graphical elements, but is ultimately just as recognizable today as it was when it was the king of the arcade.
It’s been a long time since I’ve dove into a Street Fighter game myself, but I’ve always enjoyed keeping an eye on the competitive scene and I appreciate Capcom’s dedication to evolving the franchise without stripping it of its core identity. (Too bad the same thing can’t be said about Capcom’s treatment of the Resident Evil franchise.)
Final Fantasy XVI
After a long stretch of radio silence, Square-Enix showed off the first substantial look at the latest mainline entry of the Final Fantasy series. There’s not a whole lot to say about it. Like most high profile Final Fantasy games of recent years, this looks to be yet another step in the franchise’s transition from RPG into spectacle fighter.
That’s not a game design choice I’m 100% on board with, but it sure does look pretty.
The Callisto Protocols
This game is a new intellectual property, but not exactly new in concept.
Created by some of the developers that created “Dead Space,” “The Callisto Protocols” is pretty obvious about its inspiration. The Dead Space franchise has been largely defunct since 2013 but while Electronic Arts has announced a reboot, it seems that “The Callisto Protocols” may beat them to the punch.
It looks to be every bit of the space-based horror game that its predecessor was, putting you in an isolated location full of nightmare inducing monstrosities.
Sonic Frontiers
Sega finally revealed the first bit of gameplay for the latest entry in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. This time it looks like Sonic Team has decided to put the blue blur in an open world adventure more than a little reminiscent of “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”
This is hardly the first time that Sonic Team has tried emulating a different popular video game rather than focus on what makes Sonic unique and I anticipate this latest attempt will be just as successful. For whatever that’s worth.
Aliens: Dark Descent
Video games based on the Aliens franchise, often first person shooters, have definitely been more miss than hit in recent times, but “Aliens: Dark Descent” appears to be a Real-Time Strategy take on the franchise. That’s an unusually niche genre for the license but one that could suit it well.
Stormgate
Speaking of RTS games, “Stormgate” is a new franchise developed by Frost Giant, a studio made up of former Blizzard developers. In other words, this is the new “StarCraft.”
Once again, the pattern emerges. Talented developers create a great game, publishers exploit the game and either change it or bury it, the talent leaves and regroups to create a new game that’s just like the one that made them popular in the first place.
Sometimes this works out. Sometimes not so much. Since it seems unlikely that Activision-Blizzard will be doing much with the StarCraft property any time soon, here’s hoping that this is one of the good cases.
One Piece Odyssey
Licensed anime games are hit-or-miss prospects and games based on the One Piece franchise don’t have the best track record, but I’m crossing my fingers that “One Piece Odyssey” becomes the exception.
The game looks great, so it has that going for it. At the very least they’ve got the aesthetic down. We’ll see in the gameplay provides an equally satisfying experience.
It seems that the game will be a turn based RPG, which is rare for such a title but also kind of hard to really mess up.
Obviously there was considerably more games shown than these, and even more yet to come no doubt.
It doesn’t seem that there has been much in the way of big reveals though. Virtually all the games listed here have been previously announced. Though, with development times regularly spanning years for large titles, I suppose that makes sense. The timeframe between announcing a game and having something worth showing off has gotten wider and wider.
In the meantime though, it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to play.
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge” finally releases this week, bringing the classic arcade brawler into the modern day.
Next week, “Sonic Classic” will give me yet another avenue to play the original Sonic the Hedgehog games. Not that I needed one, but I’ll buy it anyway.
And then, the week after that, the long awaited “Cuphead” DLC finally comes out, giving me a reason to go back and remember how frustrating some of those games merciless boss battles can be.
Now if only I had the time to actually do any of that.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and might get a chance to play something new in August.
