The E3 Bulletin - Thursday
Vampire dancing! Sad execs! Arguments!
The E3 bulletin runs each day of E3 week. Here are 2019's entries: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday
The sun has risen on the final day of E3, ready for all the exhibitors to nip round everybody else's booth quick before getting an early flight and "working from home" on Friday. We're all out of announcements now so the focus has moved to scandals, which this year are Sword and Shield not having every Pokemon in it - the not-unreasonable justfication being "we can't support every Pokemon indefinitely", which is being received as well as you might expect - and trans representation in Cyberpunk 2077. Yes, again.
There is some clear thinking behind the decision this time, so it can be claimed as juxtaposition of content and contemporary issue rather than accidental optimisation for the things that people always get cross about, although the inclusion remains controversial and the Discourse will continue until society improves. Unfortunately we have also received the first report that the shooting in Cyberpunk isn't all that great and you can't make out with Keanu Reeves, so that's it, it's all over, shut it all down.
Otherwise we're all out of interviews so we must let the games do the talking. And what do they say? Borderlands 3: eh. Final Fantasy 7 Remake yay!. Control: woah. Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2: press X to dance like a drunk man standing in a cloud of wasps. OK then, good talk, just going to get another drink now.
A particular local treat at E3 this year is seeing two wildly different versions of the UK on show, with the director of Pokemon Sword and Shield getting a "sense of strength and greatness from the region" and Watch Dogs 3's getting a sense of dystopian post-Brexit hellhole. You may choose your game based on Farage affiliation. Watch Dogs 3 remains a highlight of the show and shows clear Far Cry 2 tendencies, although we remain troubled by the voice acting, which is the audio equivalent of Square Enix's Avengers vs MCU Avengers only here it's Canadian voice talent vs EastEnders. RPS has helpfully produced a handy guide on how to speak Future Cockney, which contains an unimprovable list of alt-London titles including "Poundland Prime" and "Canary Wharfare".
Phil Spencer is sad that Sony aren't at E3 and so is Pete Hines, possibly because they both fancied a bit of a gloat about how they managed to get more attention than some PSVR chat and another Last of Us 2 trailer. Bayonetta 3 is also not there but Platinum says that it's going fine, thanks and they're just talking about Astral Chain right now. We haven't yet seen anybody talking about Astral Chain but we'll keep looking. Zombie Army 4 is you and three others vs Cloud Hitler, which we are pleased to note is not an alt-right streaming platform.
Breath of the Wild 2 is keeping the world and the director from the first game. You can only slice off some limbs in Star Wars: Fallen Order, so what is even the point. There's going to be Pokemon Go but for Stranger Things, and Stranger Things but for Fortnite. There is not yet a Pokemon Go for Fortnite but please be aware that it is a celestial inevitability from which nobody has any chance of escaping, like death and Call of Duty. The latter has has Spec Ops mode this year, in case you're interested. It will also have some sort of controversy, too, but we haven't seen it pop up yet and it's too exhausting to even think about researching.
In hardware news, you can use Xbox One peripherals on Xbox Scarlett, thus guaranteeing that the new-console experience will now involve fobbing off your mates with the Xbox One controller rather than the Mad Catz Scarlett controller. We trust the Scarlett controller will be enough of a leap forward to maintain the historical handicap level. Nintendo does not have any cloud gaming plans, which ranks only just behind Cyberpunk controversy as the least surprising news from the show, but apparently it does have two new Switch designs in production. You probably don't have good enough broadband for Google Stadia. The list of mini-consoles now contains a... TurboGraFX-16 Mini, it says here, which we are not convinced ever existed in the first place. We'll be back for a final news roundup tomorrow.