I haven't written a ton of stuff so far this year, and when I have, it's been about the bigger games I've played. Breath of the Wild, Horizon, Prey, those sorts of games. Because I've neglected to write about the other games I've played this year, the ones I didn't really have expansive thoughts about, I'm writing about them all here. No deep dives, just shallow swims. That, and my hot take on the Electronic Entertainment Exposition from this year. Plus some stuff on No Man's Sky and Overwatch because of course.

No Man's Sky.

You might recall that I've played a decent amount of the game. Not really sure how much, because it doesn't have an in game timer (that I know of), but it's been a lot. It's a good podcast game, it turns out. Or, at least it was for a few months there. After the last big update hit the game (and I continued to play more than I should have), I think the game actually got worse. Or at least I really didn't care for some of what was changed.

The biggest additions in the update were the ground vehicles. They're fine on their own, there just isn't much use for them, and they're too resource intensive to use. In true NMS fashion, you need to build new ones every time you want to use them on a new planet, and of course they come without any upgrades, which you also would need to build. Once you have them, they can be fun to zoom around in (except for the hover vehicle, which can't strafe, like say the Ghosts in Halo), but they're still not as effective at covering lots of ground as the ships are. You could mine stuff along the way, but most worthwhile mining spots are visible when flying, so that's not especially useful. It needs to be fueled like the ship too, so no advantage there.

Then there's the nanites. Originally in NMS, blueprints for upgrades were found all over the place, and were usually random as to what you'd get. It was far from perfect, but it encouraged looting stuff for those blueprints. Now, almost everything that used to give a blueprint gives nanites instead, which can then be spent to buy blueprints on space stations (and maybe elsewhere). This sounds better on paper, but in practice every time I've gone to one of those shops to buy blueprints, they never have anything I wanted. It was either new types of weapons for the ship (which I didn't want because I already had the lock-on lasers), or it was stuff I already had. And it's not like they all have the same selection of stuff for sale. Each one only sells five or six at a time. On top of all that, the nanites take up room in the inventory, which is just one more thing to have to manage.

But my biggest problem is the change to how the crashed ships work. Before, all you needed to do was repair some broken systems, like the launch thrusters or warp drive, and it was good as new. On top of that, they usually had a slightly bigger inventory than your current ship. Now, after changes to how the ships work in general with regard to inventory and stats, they come with a huge downside. Many of the inventory slots in crashed ships are broken, and need to be repaired. However, they aren't repaired by spending a flat amount of a resource on each slot. Instead, they cost money, and the cost increases for each slot. Meaning by the time you get the inventory fully repaired, you'd have spent as much, if not more than if you had bought the same ship from a trader on a station.

The end result of the nanites, and the changes to the crashed ships meant that I had little to no reason to partake in those "activities." That means even less variety in what I was doing, which meant I finally stopped playing NMS. Now, maybe some of that stuff was changed since I played, or maybe the next big update will improve those systems. Either way, I think I'm finally done with NMS. I wish I left that game on better terms than I did.

Quick Overwatch Update:

I played a bunch of it during the Anniversary Event, and got some skins! Still a fun game.

Quick Titanfall 2 Update:

Also still a fun game! I keep thinking they've put out that horde mode equivalent, but they haven't yet. That new Titan is cool, though. I like the idea of upgrading it mid-match, and being able to pop a full shield repeatedly after fully upgrading it is rad. That's also likely because so much is going on that I might not be paying as close attention as I should be, to be fair.

Nioh.

I was originally intending to give Nioh a proper write up, but between what I wrote about the demos last year, I didn't have a ton of new things to say. It's a fun game, and I think the core combat is great. I really wish there was more variety in the enemies, because most of them are some variant on dudes with weapons. Some are regular humans, some are skeletons, and some are demons, but they're still humanoids with weapons. Sure, there's spiders, blobs, and a couple other oddballs like umbrellas, but there's far too much repetition for a game as long as Nioh (around 50 hours for me, having done most of the side stuff).

Nioh, being set in olde timey Japan, did get me to go watch some videos about olde timey Japan. A large portion of its story is centered around an ongoing war at the time, and my curiosity as to how accurate that stuff was to the real thing got the better of me. And it turns out it's actually a lot more accurate than I would have expected, at least based on what I saw online (which I admit was really just an overview of the broad events). There weren't any demons, or anything like that, but everything else seemed pretty close.

Anyway, I enjoyed my time with Nioh, and I'd recommend it if you have an itch for Souls-ish combat (though not really most of the rest of the Souls games) and don't mind some repetition in the enemies you fight. There's an eyepatch wearing ghost cat.

VVVVVV.

Surprisingly, I hadn't actually ever played VVVVVV until this year. Not really sure how that happened, but it is what it is. The main mechanic of switching gravity between up and down instead of jumping is neat, and the game has some clever ways of keeping that fresh throughout. It's also super difficult in spots, which I think kinda hurt my overall experience with it, but I did enjoy it more often than not.

PS+ Catch Up.

Now I'm getting into the PS+ games I've played this year. This is not every PS+ game released so far this year, nor is it every one I've played. Some I only played very briefly, some I didn't play because they're PS3 games and I wish Sony would stop including those in Plus and have more/better PS4 games instead, and some don't deserve to even be mentioned here because they made me very annoyed, David Jaffe.

Titan Souls.

This one is a fun, though very challenging series of boss fights using only a magic bow and arrow. Specifically just the one arrow, because once it's shot, the shoot button pulls it back in. This locks the character in place, but the arrow can still hit the bosses whilst returning, which is a neat mechanic. The character dies in one hit, as do most of the bosses, which gives the fights a different feel from most other games I've played. Some can end in an instant, even if that instant came after many failed attempts.

If I have any complaint about the game, it's that it takes too long to retry bosses after dying. It doesn't respawn you in the boss rooms, instead at a checkpoint in each area, like a Souls game. But unlike those games, there's no enemies to fight along the way, so all it does is waste time. Death comes so quickly in Titan Souls that retrying bosses should be equally quick. The old Meat Boy/Trials design philosophy regarding instant restarts would have been greatly appreciated here.

Though I almost gave up on the game several times because of getting stuck on some bosses (which I eventually conquered all of), I did finish it, and overall enjoy my time. It's a fun game.

LittleBigPlanet 3.

I really enjoyed my time with the first two LBP games. So much so that before I even played LBP3, I went and bought the MGSV costume DLC because it was on sale, and I specifically remember playing much of LBP 1, and all of LBP 2 with the Old Snake costume. Those costumes are certainly good, and enhanced my experience with 3. That said, I was a bit disappointed with the game itself. It still has the same charm that the first two had, and there's some fun to be had, but it's really short, and most of what's new isn't that great.

In my memory, the first two LBP's were lengthy games, full of enjoyable platforming throughout. My memory has been proven wrong many times before, so don't trust me there. In my mind, at least, they were full length games, whereas LBP 3 feels like the developers wanted to demonstrate all the new mechanics, and just ended the game once they had run out of that stuff. That's not fair, it does build to a big conclusion, but that last level is also the hardest/worst in the game, and I was glad to be done with the game by the time I was. That's never a good feeling.

There's new characters, which all play differently from the Sack-folk (I'm glad the game seems to have tried to move away from gendering them with "Sack-boy," even if I dressed mine up as Punished "Venom" Sack). There's a dog (I forget its name because I used a D-Dog skin and just called it DD), one that can switch from big to small (this one got a Revolver Ocelot costume), and a bird, which I gave a Dragon Age outfit instead of the Quiet one, because I guess I got the Dragon Age DLC free for owning Inquisition. The dog is the only one I enjoyed playing, because it's fast, and can wall jump. More fun than the Sack people, honestly.

LBP 3 also has top down stuff, rather than just side scrolling, which is neat, but not really used much in the story. I'm sure there's ample user levels that use it splendidly, but I didn't spend as much time playing user levels as I probably should have. Maybe I'll get back to that some day.

Anyway, LBP 3 is fine, but my least favorite of them. If an LBP 4 ever exists, which it will because video games are still a business, I hope some significant changes are made and the story stuff is...better.

Not A Hero.

Not A Hero sees a murderous rabbit (or guy in a rabbit suit, I'm not sure) hiring British thugs to murder crime across London(?) in a bid to wipe out crime for his mayoral election. It's a fun side scrolling action game, with some good variety in how the characters play. I'm not really a fan of the game's sense of humor, and I think parts of it might be kinda racist (but it's been a while since I played the game so I don't really remember), but the shooting is fun. Not much else to say about it.

Lumo.

Lumo is a bit of an isometric platformer adventure game, and there's some neat stuff in the game. I didn't finish it, because I felt like it was starting to rely too much on precision platforming that the game didn't really do especially well, but I did enjoy a lot of what I played. Maybe I'll finish it eventually.

Tearaway Unfolded.

I also didn't finish this game, but that was because I got bored with this one. It's also kind of an adventure platformer, and like LBP, it has a cute craft-y aesthetic. It just couldn't hold my attention after the first couple hours, which is saying something because I have way too much free time, and it takes a lot to get me to stop playing something once I get more than an hour into it.

Type: Rider.

This one I did finish! Type: Rider is a game about a spunky little umlaut (it's probably a sideways colon) rolling its way through the history of typography. It's an odd premise for a game, but the different eras of fonts do lead to decent visual variety in the levels, and the game ended before I got tired of it. Though, I'm pretty sure there's a (not so) secret final level that I didn't get access to because I missed some collectibles. I didn't like it enough to go back and try to find all of those. It's neat, but not anything especially memorable.

Abzû.

This game is an Abzûlute delight. It's beautiful, fun to swim around in, and this will sound repetitive, but delightful. There really isn't a whole lot to it, but I quite enjoyed it.

Life is Strange.

Being the Giant Bomb hashtag content fiend that I am, I watched Vinny, Austin, and Alex play through Life is Strange back in 2015, so I already knew what happened. This gave me a chance to relive that game, and get a bunch of easy Trophies (they're all for completing episodes of the game and taking pictures), so I played it. Aside from some of the dialog sounding more like what adults think teens sound like than what teens actually sound like (not that I'd know, I'm no teen), and my still not caring for the final choice of the game, I really like Life is Strange. I guess I should say why I don't like the final choice? Okay, mega SPOILERS.

Like I said, there were other PS+ games I played, but I don't really think I played enough of any of them to have anything worth saying. And really, I didn't have anything worth saying about Abzû, but I really liked it, so I wanted to convey that. Killing Floor 2 seems like it'd be fun if you had people to play it with, but my internet associates and myself are bad at coordinating. Probably the same for that Disc Jam game. But now, onto E3!

E3!!

This year's E3 wasn't what I was expecting it to be. I'm not exactly sure what I expected, but this really wasn't it. None of the individual showings from the big publishers/console makers were incredibly exciting on their own, but as a whole there were a decent number of games shown off that I'll probably be excited to play when they're out.

EA.

EA wasn't a comical mess like last year (though probably still the messiest of the bunch), but they still had some good stuff to show. A Way Out was one of my favorites of the whole of E3, even if I know actually coordinating playing a full game in co-op with someone is going to be a nightmare. I wish this game existed a decade ago when I had a friend that I played games with cooperatively (locally) all the time. That aside, I do think the idea of building a full game around bespoke cooperative situations is really cool, and I hope it works out. It also seems like the sort of game that will live and die based on the strength of its writing, and its main duo, so we'll have to wait and see if that stuff works out too.

Battlefront II got me really excited in the heat of the moment, but now that some time has passed, I dunno if I'll actually play it this fall. I love Star Wars as much as the next person, but I've already got a couple multiplayer games that I flip between, and unless that campaign is rock solid, I might pass on it. Really, Battlefront II just makes me wish they had shown some of Visceral's and Respawn's Star Wars games. They weren't even mentioned by EA, which worries me a little, but hopefully it won't be an Andromeda situation for those games.

Xbox.

I think, of the actual conferences/videos, Microsoft's was the best. At the very least, it was the one that ended with me most excited about video games, even if I wasn't excited about buying an Xbox One X. Which is to say, I'm not going to buy an Xbox One X. Between the cost, a lack of first party games that interest me, and my continued lack of access to my Xbox account (due to a variety of things, ultimately hinging on anxiety around actually calling support because I worry they wouldn't be able to help because of bad decisions idiot me made 11 years ago when creating an account), I just can't justify getting one. Even if the allure of better graphics and whatnot (without building a PC which worries me for entirely different reasons) is quite...alluring.

All that said, they still had a bunch of great looking games on display, and some games that maybe don't look so great but I'll probably play anyway. I really liked the first two Metro games, so I'm definitely excited for Exodus. I'm really curious about how the inversion of the gas mask mechanics will play out over the next game. Is most of the game going to be above ground, with the occasional dive into toxic dungeons? And what's the story justification for it going to be? I have to admit, it's been long enough since I played the first two that I can't remember if there was anything in them that could explain it. And also they were games that were better at atmosphere and mood than actual storytelling, if you get my drift.

Another of the games that most got my attention at E3, and something that actually makes me a bit angry I'm as excited about as I am: Dragon Ball FighterZ. Don't get me wrong, I watched a lot of DBZ as a kid, and loved it. I also played a handful of DBZ games back then, which probably don't hold up in the slightest, but I thought they were fun. But I never expected that there would be a DBZ game coming in the year 2018 that actually looks rad. Stylistically, and game play wise, it just looks like it captures the spirit of DBZ better than any other game I've seen. Of course, being a fighting game, and one not from Nether Realm, I have no idea how much I'd actually play it. I'm not going to play that online against random people, I'll get destroyed, and I don't really have people to play with locally. Not often enough to buy the game before a massive price drop. But, let's not worry about that until next year.

Actually, I wasn't being entirely honest when I said the first party games didn't interest me. Or rather, I kinda forgot that the new Ori game is, well, at least published by Microsoft, I'm not sure if it's technically first party or not (ie, developed by a Microsoft owned studio). I didn't play the first one, but I probably would've liked it. That, and actual first party game Sea of Thieves looks pretty cool. Getting up to piratical hijinks with friends sounds like it'd be a lot of fun. But, you know where this is going, I wouldn't have people to play with often enough. Still, I'm really happy that Rare is making something new, different, and seems like it has plenty of that Rare charm that they haven't really exercised in years. Good banana eating technique, too.

Even though it's technically a Ubisoft game, Microsoft was where Assassin's Creed Origins was shown and...I want that game to be good. I love Ancient Egypt as a setting, and that game looks gorgeous (hopefully the version I play won't look too much worse), but...what they've shown so far hasn't gotten me excited in the least. It looks like they took out parts of what made Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed, and replaced them with RPG loot and bits of Far Cry that have found their way into almost everything that Ubisoft puts out. I'll probably still play it, and come away from it having had a fair amount of fun, but I can't honestly say I'm excited.

The last big thing that Microsoft showed was EA's Anthem, and I'll be honest: Anthem looks 100% up my alley. Destiny, but with off-brand Iron Man suits and (presumably?) BioWare style storytelling? It's also one of those cases where what they showed looks so visually impressive that it's hard NOT to get excited. Granted, I had to remind myself during it that who knows what the final game will actually look like, and even if the Xbox One X/PC versions do look that good, the PS4 version won't.

That's actually one of my bigger questions coming out of E3: How much better will the Xbox One X versions of these games actually look than the other console versions? It's one thing to get up on a stage and talk about 4K, it's another to actually demonstrate how different they'll look. I bet it probably will be a pretty noticeable difference with some games, like Anthem, but them not having comparisons just makes me think that it actually won't be that big a difference. That part of my brain that just assumes anything not directly stated or shown is done for some sneaky reason. And I get it, if the Xbox One S version of Forza 7 would look the same as the X version on a 720P stream, I wouldn't show it off either. But if they do look substantially different (and they probably do, don't get me wrong), I'd have at least shown a few seconds of comparison footage.

Skyrim Presents Bethesda.

Bethesda, in between announcements of new versions of Skyrim, showed off Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which is my favorite game of E3 2017. I'm not the biggest fan of the previous Wolfenstein (it was good, but I wasn't in love with it), but I'm really hopeful that The New Colossus will be a good time. The only other non-Skyrim game Bethesda showed was The Evil Within 2. I didn't play the first one, but maybe this'll be worth checking out! Who knows!

Ubisoft.

Then there's Ubisoft, which was fun to watch, but really only had one game on show that I'm likely to play, and that's Far Cry 5. Well, that's me discounting AC: Origins because of Microsoft, and assuming Beyond Good & Evil 2 won't be finished before the end of the world, but maybe it will, and maybe it'll be cool. And as funny as I think it is that the Mario & Rabbids game is an XCOM style strategy(?) game, I know that even if I had a Switch, I wouldn't play it. I'm terrible at those sorts of games, and I'm not a huge fan of playing them either. But like I said, it was fun to watch that unfold live!

Sony.

And then Sony. So far as newly announced games go, I think Monster Hunter World was the only non-VR game announced. And, somewhat like Dragon Ball FighterZ, I'm almost upset about how much I'm actually kinda excited for that game. It looks good! Hopefully it's a bit more approachable than the other Monster Hunters.

As for Sony published games, I still think Spider-Man and God of War are going to be games I'll really like. It would have been nice if the Spider-Man footage wasn't so QTE heavy, but they'll likely have a full year to better sell that game on its open-world-iness, so I'm not worried. And I'll play that Uncharted spin-off in a couple months when it's out. Same with the Horizon DLC. But the rest of Sony's games this E3? Can't say Days Gone does anything for me, aside from the zombie swarming being neat to at least look at. And Detroit? Low expectations. That Shadow of the Colossus remake looks nice, but I'll probably wait until that drops in price before buying it, given that I've played the original numerous times already.

Sony's showing was disappointing as a whole. No Death Stranding trailer, which I knew was going to be the case because Kojima said as much, but that doesn't make it less disappointing. I mean, they had two trailers for it last year! No mention of The Last of Us Part II, which just makes me think they should have held off on announcing that. Last year Sony had more than enough announcements, so they probably could have benefited from holding one or two until this year, given that they certainly didn't come out between then and now.

Frankly, Sony in general has really been going back into "Hubris Sony" mode lately, and I don't like it one bit. I'm not talking about how the E3 show had too little talking, and weird stuff like people dangling from the ceiling (though I wasn't a fan of that). I mean stuff like having that guy out there saying that people don't want to play old games, and that's why they don't have backwards compatibility. Stuff like raising the price of PlayStation Plus last year, but doing nothing to indicate that the extra money is being used to improve PSN as a whole, or the games provided on Plus.

It kind of makes me want to get an Xbox One X to, you know, "send a message" about which corporation that doesn't actually care about me gets my money. I just don't have that much money, and I'm too deep into Sony with the games I've already bought to just jump ship (never mind the aforementioned account troubles). Why can't all corporations cater to what I think they should be doing?

Nintendo.

Anyway, last up is Nintendo. I think Super Mario Odyssey looks weird and out there in the ways that I want big Nintendo games to be. I just don't think I can afford to get a Switch this year, not when Odyssey is the only game I'd get for it. So, despite the hilarity of revealing that Mario can possess things via hat, and have them grow mustaches, I can't say I'm especially excited for Nintendo at the moment either. Maybe by the time Metroid Prime 4 is a game, rather than just a logo, there will be enough games to get a Switch for.

Now that I've written all this out, and thought about it, I actually feel worse about E3 than I did just a few days ago. Maybe I just forgot about something good, I dunno. Anyway, there's going to be great games still coming out, so that's what really matters, right? If you've read this whole rambling mess, thank you. Next time I write something, I'll try to keep it a bit more concise, and focused.