Hello and welcome to this edition of me writing about video games. Last week as you all know was E3, so a lot of new things came to be. While the show itself was underwhelming (which shouldn't be surprising with it getting down to the end of the current cycle) there were still games out there that looked like they deserved to be talked about. So this week I bring to you some of the games that interested me, interested you, and above all made the show more interesting. So to begin, I'm going to kick it off with a game I have been waiting for since 2004. A game that was teased throughout this generation but never actually revealed up until now:

Pikmin 3

The return of Pikmin is close at hand with the launch of the Wii U this year, and the announcement that officially made this game a thing has me by the neck. I have been a huge Pikmin fan since the original game back during the GameCube launch. I had been anticipating more since the release of Pikmin 2 during 2004, but Olimar and the Pikmin have been out of action since, only making one appearance in Smash Brothers as a combatant. With only the Overlord games coming close to the original formula, there hasn't been one of these kinds of games in over eight years. With a lot of new features already shown in the press conference, it seems like this game still has many things we don't know about it as of yet. Where is Olimar? How many new types of Pikmin will accompany the new Rock Pikmin? What's the story behind the four leader characters? Hopefully all these questions will be answered within the coming months, but for now, I'm just glad this game is coming out. I'm not looking forward to spending $250-300 just to play one game, but with Pikmin, I just know that it'll be an experience that people shouldn't miss.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Now I have not played a single Need For Speed game, not even the first one Criterion had a part in. Yet I have played plenty of Burnout games in order to be excited for this one. An open world environment, somewhat destructible cars, smashing through billboards, this has all the stuff to make itself the rightful successor of Burnout Paradise. Even if my only hands on experience with Paradise was only very long stretches with the demo, I could safely say that no game has been able to lock me into a small sample of itself for so long, for multiple days even. After seeing this game I should probably make it a priority to get my hands on it after all these years, cause it clearly deserves it. I wish I had a bit more to say about it, but like I said this will be my first take into the Need For Speed franchise. Even though my expectations are high and I know a bit of what I'm going to get I'm not entirely sure how to put it into words from an outside looking in perspective. All I know is from the first reveal at the conference, and what I saw in that footage, this has to be a day one pick up.

The Last of Us

There's really only one way to sum up the demo during the conference, that dude has no face left. We finally got to see The Last of Us in action this E3, and boy did it look pretty good. While watching the demo, I couldn't really help but notice some of the Uncharted similarities I saw, but all of those were blown out of the water as soon as the conflict with the other dudes happened. My god, compared to all the guys you light up in the Uncharted games it seems like a group containing only three to four guys can be just as deadly in this game. I do expect to see a lot of the missed execution from I Am Alive to be achieved when this game eventually rolls itself out whenever it does. The way that Joel interacts with the environment during fist fights seemed to also get kicked up a notch from Uncharted, as I was not expecting him to bash the enemy's head into that end table, and my eyes literally lit up when that scavenging menu popped up when the player made that Molotov on the fly like that. There is a lot of tools it seems in and out of combat to get you into or out of a lot of situations. While there wasn't any character banter between Joel and Ellie, I am not distressed due to all of the other reports of the extended demo. A while back I said I wanted another trip into Uncharted with Nathan Drake, I no longer want that trip if this is what Naughty Dog's future looks like.

Watch Dogs

Going into the Ubisoft conference, I was not expecting a lot. Rayman Legends becoming a thing, more AC3 coverage. I just about had no interest after the incident with a good looking game gone bad, Shootmania happened (doesn't change my view that Shootmania looks really good). Then... Watch Dogs happened. This thing was accompanied by the most Syndicate trailer I have ever seen. When they were talking new IP, I figured there was no way Ubisoft had anything left, they were totally not going to show what this thing was about. Then... They totally showed what this thing was about. What followed seemed to be a very modern day Assassin's Creed. A guy in a trench coat that had these incredible hacking skills manages to get into this club, and gather information. Some cool things happened, like when he was looking around it was showing things about people that other people really shouldn't know. There was a guy with a QR code for a face that actually led to something in real life. All of this stuff looked great and the game looked really great, but then THIS happened:

So naturally a good way to get information in a game like this would be to hack into devices and listen into conversations. Unfortunately for me I was suddenly flashed back to a scene where Altair sits down on a bench and eavesdrops on a conversation between two dudes in order to get information on his target. That one thing in Assassin's Creed 1 has scarred me for life, and with that I cannot get these doubts out of my head for this game. Now I know nothing about how the mission structure of the game is or how you go about progressing in it, I still can't escape this idea that Watch Dogs could be to it's possible franchise like how Assassin's Creed 1 is to the Assassin's Creed franchise in general. I probably should be putting my skepticism into other things like the game being another shooter or the bullet time, but something about eavesdropping conversations has just left a bad taste in my mouth. While I still am interested in this game for what seems to be offered, I'm not going to let myself get burnt like Assassin's Creed 1. Color me cautious for this new Ubisoft game.

Beyond: Two Souls

Now knowing Quantic Dream, this thing really isn't going to be much of a video game, but due to the amount I actually liked Heavy Rain, I'm looking forward to "playing" this new one. Most of my love of these games comes from me playing them with one of my friends, which unfortunately me not being around the same area as him anymore may hinder the experience a bit. Yet one of my fondest moments from Heavy Rain came from watching my friend go through it in one sitting. Seeing what he picked and how his ending looked compared to mine was a blast, because of one key thing between his and mine was Agent Jayden. While I got Jayden all the way to the end, I was forced to sit and watch him try to get through the Mad Jack encounter, which ended up him failing too many times on sixaxis movements. What came out of it was a very creepily happy Mad Jack dragging Jayden away to what I assume wasn't to patch him up and watch over him. The conversation afterwards was pretty much like this.

"Wait what just happened?!"

"You just totally let Jayden die."

"Wait what?!"

"You let Mad Jack kill him, and now he's gone forever."

"I didn't mean too!"

"You like totally missed out on a big chunk of the end."

"Can I just-"

"It's over, man"

"BUT"

"IT'S OVER, LET IT GO!"

Despite this key element most likely going to be missing for me, I'm still pretty excited to get into Beyond. I thought that the character models were a complete step up from what we saw from Heavy Rain, as it looks like they've developed the tech a bit more on it. I'm a bit curious on how most of the QTEs will be handled with the ghost following the Ellen Page character around, though from what we heard on the Afterhours stream it seems to be just your basic button pushes to get that hot shit started. If we get anything like the Scott Shelby rampage during Heavy Rain, sign me the fuck up.

The Super Monday Night Combat Corner!

I did mention this at the top right? No? Oh well! While E3 was making a ruckus, I was still dropping mad time in SMNC as I normally should be! Unfortunately even if it was E3, Uber really didn't do much during the week besides reintroduce All Star Leveling and Pro Tags back into the game. Even though Pro Tags are back in I'm bummed because it means my stats were not taken care of well. I have a total of 9 hours and ~2300 kills in game, while the kills may be true anyone who's seen my time played on Steam can call shenanigans that I've only played 9 hours. Not only that, my kills seem to come out of nowhere, as I only have around 150 kills with the Vet and only a staggering 11 kills with my main cybro Karl. Despite that discouraging news I still just played like nothing happened, who cares about those totally cool Pro Tags you can attach to your name anyway?

Most of my playtime this week also heavily favored The Veteran, as I'm still practicing pretty hard with him to understand him even better. I'm still getting used to how the Ka-Klaw works, as I still tend to clip small parts of the floor and walls trying to pull people in resulting in a wasted cooldown. It's probably not helping either I'm playing what is primarily a grapple character on the US East region, as my ping isn't favorable on those servers. What's even worse is that the US East region also attracts people even FURTHER away from the East than me, I've seen totals of over 200 ping in some games. All you need to know is that a lot of my stool grapples end up looking like I'm using a mime's furniture to kill people from time to time. I'm also getting many situations where I do not get the last hit on my kills, only snagging assists. Which is fine in practice if my team is competent to use those kills to help the cause, but when that doesn't become the case I tend to fall way behind in levels in some games. Which reminds me of last week about that one Tank, there were games this week where I go 10-2 and I'm totally in the cellar on my team in terms of money gain. I know I wasn't heavy on the bots in some of those games but... there were some guys who weren't even putting up the same numbers and getting more dosh than me. I mean I've been to some alone time with Bullseye and Jungle Bots, but do they really level you up that fast mid game? Or is it people using Money Magnet? Are people maintaining Bot Streaks? All I do know is that I still have to find that balance with the Veteran like I do with the Tank or Karl, I just don't know the spot where he can spiral out of control yet.

Out of all the games I did play this week, there was really one I had to mention that was just one of the oddest I've played. It started off in the pro select screen (Where most of them start), except this time, some dude starts complaining that someone locked is precious Assault. So in response of this he picks Gunner, and as the game starts, he goes off and dies purposely three times to the enemy team. At this point in my head I'm like "GREAT", someone was so mad that he wanted to throw the game for us. After about his third death he just straight up leaves, so while we DID lose a teammate, we ended up dodging a bullet due to his intentional feeding. While that was going on, both me and a Sniper start pushing their right lane pretty hard, their team reacts and starts a great big firefight in the middle of the lane with just me and the Sniper. The other team ALSO ended up picking a Veteran and tried to pull me into their group of guys to be ganked, he missed, and I ended up pulling him into our meager group of two dudes and straight up busted his face up. For some reason, their team did not see it fit to go in and overrun our tiny push, even after I started pulling them in one by one. Long story short their defense was garbage, we got an early turret down in a 5v4. Fast forward a bit, for some reason our CG is able to hold everyone off at the Anni fights and we control it for most of the game. Their Veteran 9 deaths later just calls it quits and we're back to an even game. We wear them down to their back turrets, and everything seems to be going our way, UNTIL...

They managed to sneak a Jackbot past us! We have to run all the way back (For some of us respawn) and get this mofo out of our base. Now with the recent updates the Jackbots have been acting a bit funny as of late. This one in particular passed one of our front turrets on the right lane and just OBLITERATED our Moneyball Rock-it turrets! We get that Jackbot down, but their team is pushing pretty hard, so naturally we counter their push and wipe out the whole team, and continue our push to their Moneyball. With them still respawning our bots reach their back turrets and we proceed to take them out, Our Defenders set up their turrets and we start going to town. I was unfortunately not there at the end of it due to me being taken out to a dumb Megabeth Whirling Derbish, We won the game. Now in the end the game doesn't sound as weird as I made it out to be, but it just strikes me as odd how the Gunner just left the game after purposely dying three times in a row. If he was just going to purposely feed the other team, why didn't he just stick around to make sure we lost? I know I shouldn't be looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I just can't help but wonder why this guy didn't go out on his troll attempt.

The End! (?)

With E3 at a close, we can finally get back to our normal routine of playing games instead of getting anticipated to play games. This is the second week in a row that Dragon's Dogma is still not in, 3 if you're counting the first blog post. So next week, don't expect it! Instead, Lollipop Chainsaw more than likely, and also Diablo 3, as a kind soul was able to get it for me (hint: it was the guy I watched play Heavy Rain). Maybe Lone Survivor too, as I got to it two days ago and want to get through that atleast once. So look out for all those and maybe more next week!

SEE YOU GUYS LATER