I'm writing this from inside the E3 mod bunker, preparing for another conference stream and another chat with eight thousand people in it. EA's conference was a garbage fire, but fortunately our chat wasn't so much, so here's hoping people can remain civil for the rest of the event. Well, civil to a certain extent. I don't think there was any way of politely tiptoeing around how stoned Jamie Foxx was during that Battlefield 1 celebrity alpha event.

As for the week leading up to E3, and the week to follow, there's still plenty to talk about that doesn't involve a hundred new trailers for the many games between now and when the lurching juggernaut that is E3 rolls its way around again. I want to highlight one particular Not-E3 happenstance going on at the moment, and that's my Alternative to E3 series which is taking a look at a lost Squaresoft JRPG right in the midst of their golden age: 1996's Rudra no Hihou, or Treasure of the Rudras. The first two parts are already up over here, and I hope to keep you appraised on Vbomb the Vocabulary Warrior's adventures as E3 continues (though I might make the resolution on the screenshots a little smaller...).

I may have got my days wrong in that blog title, though: It could be that this is actually Day -1 of E3 and Day 0 is tomorrow with the Monday conferences for Microsoft, Ubisoft and Sony. Day 1 is when the show floor opens the day after that. Yeah, this is pretty much why I sleep through E3 every year; the logistics are too hard to follow.

New Games!

All right, so it's a "big" release, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the release I'm looking forward to most this week is Book 5 of Dreamfall Chapters, the third game in The Longest Journey/Dreamfall series from Ragnar Tørnquist and his team. I completed the first three Books - what the game is calling its episodes, now that it's one of those episodic adventure games that are all the rage - during last month's May Mastery. I've been putting off Book 4 until I heard confirmation on Book 5 so that I wouldn't have to suffer any cliffhangers. This also means that I'm one of the few TLJ/Dreamfall fans that has never had to wait on tenterhooks for the next game, something that fans of the almost 17-year-old The Longest Journey might hate me for given the huge gaps between each release. I can't wait to see what Kian and Zoe have been up to, and how the game is choosing to close the book - as it were - on a story that has taken almost two decades to complete. The original game's title wasn't a misnomer after all...

There... really isn't a whole lot else out this week. Sometimes we get a big release around E3 just to annoy all the game journalists whose attention is focused elsewhere (which makes it a great time to release something crappy under the radar), but this week is tumbleweeds for miles around. Minecraft is finally coming out on the Wii U to coincide with whatever depressing dirtbag thing Notch said this week on Twitter, Vita and PS4 are getting their Octodad on, while Ori and the Blind Forest is seeing a "definitive edition" for Xbox One. The Elder Scrolls Online receives its Dark Brotherhood expansion this week, which I'm guessing is both a figurative and literal stab in the dark by Bethesda to attract more users. On Steam, we have Dead by Daylight, a new multiplayer horror shooter from Starbreeze, something called The Narrator Is a DICK (a The Stanley Parable follow-up?) and... Nurse Love Addiction? Ewww, now I remember why I don't check Steam's upcoming (so to speak!) section very often for these segments.

Well, next week should prove to be more interesting at least. Unless you're an anime fan on prom night. Yeah, that game's finally coming out. Lord help us.

Wiki!

Because this week's game was a perfect "podcast" game - the sort of open-world collectible huntfest that you can enjoy while listening to whatever podcasts you have lined up - I took a break with the wiki this week. I completed the rest of September, which just involved another ten game pages so I could hit the next quarterly milestone for these title screen collages I do every so often.

I've also been making a checklist for the games to be featured in 2016's "Summer Games Done Quick" charity livestream event, one of two that the speedrunning community puts on every year. It's been around enough that I think everyone's familiar by now, but I like to do my part by ensuring we have a semi-presentable page for every game that gets showcased by the talented runners that appear every year. In particular, I want to make sure that each game has enough of a page that Twitch won't dismiss it as a "stub" and refuse to include in their database as a result. This year's SGDQ promises to have a lot of lesser known PC Indie games, so I want to get on that project as soon as possible. I've left the Super '95 project in a good place right now, with three quarters of the year complete, so the next few Sunday Summaries will probably focus more on the SGDQ event. Time being of the essence on that one, and all.

For now, let's talk about those remaining September '95 games. No new additions to the wiki this week, not surprising given the small number of pages covered, but there's a few significant titles in here worth exploring:

Metal Max Returns is a 16-bit remake of the original Metal Max for Famicom, which is a combination of Final Fantasy, Front Mission and the Mad Max movies and a game series that Westerners might know better from the PS2 incarnation Metal Saga. Metal Max already saw a Super Famicom sequel - 1993's Metal Max 2 - but I imagine it was popular enough to convince the developers to make this remastered version of the original. The Metal Max games are perhaps known first and foremost for letting the player build their own vehicles and travel the wastelands taking down monsters in their souped up rides, but they're also known for their open-world aspect: players take on missions at their leisure, some story-significant and others not so much, and you use the resources from those missions to build up your convoy and characters until you're ready to take on something tougher. It's a shame it took so long for the series to come to the US; like EarthBound, it practically feels built to appeal to that market.

Talking of off-beat Japan-only RPGs that could've easily found an audience States-side, Verne World is an RPG that introduces a streetwise kid and his more innocent brother as they get dropped off by their parents in "Verne World", a near-future theme park based on the literary works of French sci-fi author Jules Verne. There's no translation for the game, but I imagine the older kid was there under duress and planning to be bored out of his skull when suddenly the power goes out and the animatronics start attacking people. At that point it becomes a Verne-inspired Westworld where some exhibit robots - Around the World in Eighty Days' Passepartout and Philias Fogg, to name two - are actually friendly and join the party. It sounds nuts, and maybe it doesn't play so hot - developer Dual doesn't have a big history of JRPGs prior to that game, and Banpresto's role as publisher probably meant that an SD Gundam shows up at some point - but it seems like a shame that no fan translation exists.

Now, if you want to annoy the entire Giant Bomb staff, I think forcing them to play Wedding Peach might do it. The game is a competitive mini-game collection based on a shoujo manga about a trio of schoolgirls - who are also angels - who balance their time between saving the world from Lucifer and trying to mack on the cute soccer player in their class. This mutual crush comes to the fore here, as the three compete to be the one to ask him out to a school dance. The mini-games are kinda bad, but if ever there was a Mario Party style game that you could be sure Dan would hate in equal measure to the rest of the crew, this would be it. If Jeff and co. are considering some mutually assured destruction after all the Mario Party Parties are complete...

I'll just briefly mention Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge before moving onto the fifth and final game this week, because it highlights the odd relationship Japan has with the Wizardry series. You'll often see other venerable CRPG franchises taken out of mothballs every so often - the recent release of Might & Magic X Legacy, for example, or InXile's sequel/reboots of Wasteland and The Bard's Tale - but Wizardry is one of the oldest cornerstones of the dungeon-crawling genre and has been the domain of Japanese publishers for several decades now. After Wizardry 8 failed to keep the franchise alive, despite being pretty damn good actually, every subsequent game has been created overseas and usually without any US or EU release coming back over. Wiz VI itself was first released in Wizardry's heyday back in 1990, but this SNES port that came five years later was only released in Japan. It's very strange. If you want a taste of Japan Wizardry, your best bets are the PS2 game Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land or the semi-recent Steam release of Elminage Gothic (a "spiritual sequel" series).

The last game for today, and indeed the last game to be released in September of 1995, Seiken Densetsu 3 was one of THE big Japan exclusives being heavily discussed in the earliest Super Nintendo emulation communities on the internet. Final Fantasy V and the original Front Mission were prime candidates for fan translations early on of course, along with everything else Squaresoft was involved in like Live a Live, Bahamut Lagoon and Treasure of the Rudras (I can vouch for that one) after they shot to megastardom with the PlayStation Final Fantasy games. Lot of folk wanted Mystic Ark, the first Clock Tower or the many untranslated Super Robot Wars and Dragon Quest and Fire Emblem games. Not to mention the Shin Megami Tensei fandom, which was crazy even back then. But the follow-up to Secret of Mana? A follow-up that, somehow, has an even better reputation than the already stellar SNES classic? I remember hearing all sorts of superlative things about the game, though it proved too intimidating to get into at the time with its scenario-based structure. Needless to say, people hold the first three Seiken Densetsu games - the first was released worldwide as Final Fantasy Adventure for Game Boy - in very high regard.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor!

I do want to collect my thoughts on certain aspects of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in a larger blog further down the road, maybe after E3 is over and I've caught up with my Dreamfall Chapters recaps, but on the whole I can definitely concur with Giant Bomb and many other outlets' decision to name it their game of the year in 2014. While it's not perfect - it has the same free-running/climbing pathfinding issues that has crippled Assassin's Creed for years now, and I don't care for how it never gives you the option to restart non-story missions, just to abandon them and force you to run back to the trigger point - there's a lot in here to exonerate a few mechanical open-world flaws.

Obviously, the big standout is the Nemesis system. It's odd that we still haven't seen anyone try to ape it, given it's been two years and thus plenty of time for a new game to try their own variant. (I'm actually hoping that maybe a new Crackdown can do something similar, giving the criminals that manage to take down your super cop a boost in their underworld rep and perhaps some new weapons and armor befitting their status.) What's more significant though, and this is what my eventual deeper blog post on the subject will delve into, is how the game manages to take the procedurally generated Uruk nemeses and gives them a personality beyond a silly name and some growled insults about eating manflesh. Specifically, how every Uruk seems to have their own strengths and weaknesses, and how they can play into building them up as distinctive enemies.

More on that later, though. For now I want to talk about everything else. I'm not a big LOTR fanboy, so the reveal that the mysterious wraith was Celebrimbor was lost on me, but I appreciate that the game dug deep like so many figurative doomed dwarves for all its Middle-earth lore, collecting a lot of information about the human civilization that prospered on the edges of the desolate realm of Mordor between Sauron's various resurrections, and how the game sets up a lot of what happens in the LOTR movie and what would've already happened in the Hobbit movies. Orcish propaganda, for instance, considers the Battle of the Five Armies that ended the original Hobbit novel as "the battle to gang up on the orcs". We hear snippets about Shelob (as well as her relatively harmless children), learn that the forces of Gondor have fled Mordor's Black Gate and are regrouping back in Minas Tirith and meet some of Sauron's lesser known henchmen who act as the game's core antagonists, following the same theme as "The Mouth of Sauron" by representing a different aspect of the Dark Lord while he takes a break from existence - cursed beings that represent his might, his malice and his duplicity respectively.

I also have to give major props to nailing the gameplay flow, which is one of those visceral instinctive things that you either have to , or have such a keen understanding of game design and what makes it tick that you opt for whatever's fun over whatever feels more realistic. I mean, you're already a ghost fighting orcs, so realism shouldn't have been a major goal in the first place. It's a game that feels better the further you get into its character development, as each new skills unlocks new means of murdering orcs faster and in a more extravagant way. While you're sticking to the shadows for much of the game, avoiding getting into giant fights just in case some chump orc gets lucky and lands himself a free promotion for temporarily taking down the scariest dude roaming across Mordor, towards the end all that ceases to matter. You can ride into battle on top of a three story high troll, or fire off a dozen headshots without running out of arrows, branding a dozen orcs to join you in your fight, or pumping up your combo skills to such an extent that you're able to perform showy executions on every other swing. There's a tough side-mission where you have to defeat fifty orcs without dying, and once you've leveled up it becomes an amazing dance of death and destruction as they mill around unable to land a hit on you. The level of power fantasy on offer for players is palpable, and it's made even more fun by the way Uruk captains will show up to gravely threaten you, only to lie dead seconds later from a few flashy moves.

It definitely put in perspective all those saying that The Witcher 3's combat was a little disappointing. If Shadow of Mordor was the last big open-world game with swordfighting in it, then I can understand perfectly why you'd come away from The Witcher 3 underwhelmed. While Mordor's combat rarely gets more sophisticated than hitting the counter button occasionally and remembering which finisher is bound to which combination of face buttons (there are four, for the four quadrants of the face buttons, which gets confusing), it's the level of options and strategies to fall back on - what I initially praised The Witcher 3's combat for - that elevates Shadow of Mordor above the usual Arkham Batman/Assassin's Creed crowd. Basing all the upgrades around Talion's sword, bow and dagger - which represent melee, ranged and stealth takedowns respectively - was a smart decision by the designers.

Anyway, I've probably said enough, and I'm sure all of it was reflected in the reviews and GOTY approbations at the time. I'm glad I finally got around to playing it this week, and it feels like another big name has been ticked off the video game bucket list. Plus, it means I've now played all of Giant Bomb's "Game of the Year" winners bar one (I'll get around to The Last of Us some day, I swear).