As I write this, I've submitted my votes for Giant Bomb's E3 Banner contest, and am preparing my body (to use the official vernacular) for EA's press briefing in a scant few hours. E3's always a weird time for me, because I'm always ambivalent about the event itself - as a, let's diplomatically say "frugal", consumer of video games, it'll probably be at least a year before I'll try anything I see at E3 2018, and there's a palpable sense of stress from the GB crew as they gamely try to weather the storm of hype, business deals, and executives trying to tell you the true meaning of them there "video games". I get a lot of second-hand anxiety from all that, both from the duders working their asses off to put on a show as well as the various awkward speakers at the briefings themselves, and the payoff of seeing some games I won't be allowed to touch for ages isn't really worth the heartache.

That said, there's no way to really avoid E3 if you're deeply involved in this medium. Though its lost a lot of its impact over the years with the advent of "influencers" and companies taking control of their message (well, barring a leak or twenty), it's still the most significant time of year for video game developers and enthusiasts alike. While I'll still put on my usual "Alternative to E3" series for those feeling as enervated by the event as I am, I'll also be acknowledging its bounty of reveals and teasers with my now-customary "Trailer Blazer: E3" list sometime later this month. In other words, it'll be business as usual this year, as I spend the month close to collapsing from a combination of modding the night shows, blogging like a maniac, and suffering the high temperatures of a seasonably toasty June. Cue the world's tiniest Nintendo Labo cardboard violin for my first-world problems.

Before I jump into the blogs and addenda, I wanted to clarify what the theme of this year's daily "Alternative to E3" series will be, which I'll probably get started on later this evening thanks to EA extending the E3 season out another superfluous day. If you recall, I had a ball of a time playing that A Link to the Past randomizer, and it got me wondering about a few other randomizers I could check out. There's a huge repository of them here, and I'm going to dip my toes into a handful of them over the coming days. Most of them will be SNES games - I do have a predilection for that platform, after all, and these randomizers work best when you're already experienced with the games they pertain to - but I'm hoping to see a fair assortment of different ideas for what a randomizer hack might entail. A Link to the Past will be the challenging bar to beat, of course, but I'm hopeful there are some other good ProGen concepts out there.

With all the above in mind, this week's really the quiet before the storm here in the BlogZone, or rather it's the quiet between two storms given all that old game blogging last May. At any rate, there's just the two for you all this week:

• The first Indie Game of the Week for June is the delightful Hidden Folks, created by a small Dutch team with some influence (I suspect) from Amanita Design, which tasks the player to locate a bunch of tiny, doughy "folk" from an enormous animated illustration. Its masterstroke, and the aspect that elevates it above standard hidden object fare and Where's Waldo, is that each illustration is filled with hotspots to interact with and manipulate, often revealing the targets you're looking for if they happen to be the shy type. The game's clues are just enough to point you in the right direction but it can be very tricky all the same, especially on the enormous levels. But hey, it's still a super chill way to spend a few hours, and it looks like the game's going to see frequent free expansions post-release as a happy bonus.
• The alternative Tuesday slot that once hosted Rainy Days and Mundis and the A Link to the Past Randomizer will now host a Wiki-related feature for the foreseeable future. This feature, Mega Archive, will attempt to document all the Mega Drive releases from all regions in chronological order of release. Mega Archive: Part I covers the first twenty games for the system, from the arcade "remix" Space Harrier II to the ninja nonpareil The Revenge of Shinobi. While my current system of twenty releases per update might be a little optimistic, I'm hoping to make a serious dent in the Mega Drive's library this year, ensuring that all the apposite details are available on our wiki before I summarize them in these blogs. If you're interested in the history of Sega's breakout console, be sure to check out new entries in this series every fortnight.

Addenda

Movie: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Oh boy. I'm not quite sure what keeps bringing me back to these dinosaur movies besides a strong affection for the first (hey, I was ten at the time) but return to them I do. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom resumes a few years after the original Jurassic World left off, and is to that movie what The Lost World was to the first Jurassic Park: less a story about whether humans should be bringing back colossal monsters from the antediluvian past, more about our conservationist responsibility to them now that they're already here. Using the imminent eruption of a volcano on Isla Nublar - the Costa Rican site of both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World - as an excuse to get back to the island and save a representative handful of the species there, the film explores the usual series-wide questions of meddling with forces beyond our control and the rampant greed that motivates said very bad decisions. We're joined yet again by Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire Dearing, who has become a conscientious campaigner on behalf of the living creatures she once only saw as profitable wonders, and Chris Pratt's raptor-wrangler Owen Grady, who has taken on something similar to a Grant role of walking away from what was once an integral part of his life. There's a bunch of new characters too, but they range from inconsequential dinosaur food to ineffective comic relief.

Honestly, I didn't find Fallen Kingdom all that bad. It has a certain narrative focus that helps its case by keeping everyone more or less in the same place, and it's minimized some of the wanton cruelty of the first Jurassic World (what did that PA ever do?) and reduced the number of precocious dino-loving children to just the one, but in exchange it's become even more... well, comical. It knows it's aiming for a certain age group of kids, one that's young enough to want to see dinosaurs causing a ruckus while all the dumb adults run around screaming but also old enough to deal with the significant amount of dino-on-human violence and dismemberments, and so it feels a bit goofier and more focused on dinosaur antics. I guess what I mean by that is that it's pulling back on Chris Pratt's one-liners and abrasive charm and focusing more on the dinos themselves such as one that mugs to the camera after they trick a hunter by playing dead, or a hard-headed dinosaur that runs into things and hobbles around in a daze for a few seconds, or a long bathetic shot of a brachiosaur as it sits on the dock all sad it couldn't escape the island in time while everyone cries watching it. Certainly a few eyerolls going on.

Without revealing too much about where the story goes in the second half (though the trailers, which have been running relentlessly, pretty much already spoiled everything), the director J. A. Bayona and cinematographer Óscar Faura make great use of the setting with the movie's new, even scarier genetically modified dino, and it almost splits the movie in terms of tone: the first half is all Aliens with its spectacle and chaos, while the second half is more Alien with a subdued tense atmosphere and a singular, sinister antagonist. It's still a perfectly average PG-13 popcorn movie, just like every other Jurassic Park sequel, but I think it's a step up from the previous movie at least.

Game: Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (2014)

Given that E3 will throw a wrench into any long-term video game plans I might make this month, I figured I'd be better off digging into something I could play in smaller sessions between everything else going on over the next week. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U's various single-player modes, none of which last for more than half an hour per "game", seemed like an ideal way to wind down whenever I had a moment free.

My relationship with the Smash Bros. series is an unusual one, perhaps even going against the spirit of the game's multiplayer focus. Rather than getting a group together to kick it on Final Destination for a while, I'm all about those collectibles and single-player challenges. Each game since Melee has given the player a huge amount of virtual Nintendo memorabilia to find and hoard, providing players with a nostalgic trip through the annals of the company's long history producing games and working with various third-parties to create a populated universe on par with Disney's or Marvel's (though I guess they're the same thing now). I love spending my time completing the game's achievement-like challenges, which range from tackling various modes with difficult modifiers or specific characters, to exploring the more off-beat options like the Target Smash and Home-Run Contest mini-games or the SSBfWU's new Mario Party-esque Smash Tour mode (which, honestly, I'm not too hot on).

However, something that has been spoiling my fun is just how difficult SSBfWU's challenges are. I figured they'd be on par with Super Smash Bros. for 3DS's harsh but fair demands, being that they're effectively the same game, but SSBfWU really goes out of its way to stump you. If it's not completing the original Classic mode on the highest difficulty without losing a life, it's completing the harrowing All-Star mode - in which you have to take on every fighter in the game in a relentless gauntlet - without using healing items or within six minutes or on its hardest setting (with all characters, even). The fact that a lot of these challenges also require using a specific fighter just adds to the obscene level of difficulty, as you're tasked with completing difficult objectives you'd have enough trouble accomplishing with one of your "mains" let alone some joke character you've tried twice. I'm all about Link's up/down stabs and double-hit side-smashes, as well as his ranged specials, but tell me to complete one of the hardest challenges of the game as the Duck Hunt Duo or Captain Olimar and I'll just fall apart.

It's a shame, because I come to this series for its collectibles and history lessons, and putting several of those trophies, soundtracks and other goodies behind these impassable barriers demotivates me to the point where I'm disinclined to try and complete the set like I have done for every Smash Bros game prior. Like Mario Kart, the Smash Bros series isn't one you're supposed to take particularly seriously in a competitive sense - the frantic nature of the multi-person melees and the fortune-reversing items like the hammer or a particularly powerful Pokemon spawn means that skill alone isn't always enough - and I feel like the developers kind of missed the point by implementing these sadistic trials. Still, there's a significant portion of the game that's as accessible as always, from the cleverly designed Events to the new Master Orders and Crazy Orders modes: the former lets you spend money to earn specific bonuses, but only if you complete a fight with randomly-determined parameters and opponents, while the latter is an increasingly difficult gauntlet version of same where you gamble with how far you're willing to push yourself for even greater payouts.

At this point, I'm going to sweep up the remaining challenges that seem feasible, maybe try beating Classic mode (which is much more varied than it has been in the past) with everyone for those character-specific trophies, and then move onto something else. It's certainly not a bad game by any stretch, and I've enjoyed my time with it so far taking on its more reasonable goals, but knowing that there's a ridiculous, professional-Smash-player-only-tier skill ceiling I'll never reach is dispiriting to say the least.