I had a piece all about E3 written and ready to go but I scrapped it. It started with some half assed lament about not getting to go again and how I wish I'd been there, but in retrospect, after having a few days quiet of the non stop news and announcements. I'm quite glad I didn't attend E3 this year, because in hindsight it really sucked. My article had some fluff commentary on some of the games I was interested in and a stab at the Wii U that I went back and half heartedly toned down.

But it's after midnight on a Friday and I'm feeling particularly toned up on the subject of games in general.

E3 this year just plain sucked; three hollow, empty days of yesterdays games ironed out and handed over with faint tweaks to make us buy them again. A flood of titles that are difficult to even identify individually from screenshots without adding captions and a lack of any hope for the future. In the past E3 has occasionally given me a twinkle of enthusiasm, a childlike glee and excitement for the next 12 months, a banquet of ideas and technologies to feast on. This E3 was more like week old mouldy pizza, heated up in a microwave and sold at gourmet prices with a fee for wiping your hands on a napkin. A new Farcry 3 that looks like Farcry 1, Tomb Raider 10 which was pretty much Uncharted with Lara Croft, and all the latest additions to the current franchises. What was really missing this year was something, anything, one single thing new.

None of the major players had anything new or exciting to say. Microsoft, a bunch of sequels and nothing original, not even any original and interesting Kinect games (Rise of Nightmare looks rubbish), Sony says 3D is awesome, (it isn't, it's complete shit, one of the worst things to happen to AV entertainment since region locking, I don't expect to ever unwrap the 3D glasses that came with the TV I bought a month ago and I haven't seen a 3D film since Avatar) and Uncharted 3 is coming out, as if you didn't know, and we've got a new PSP, third time lucky we guess, and Nintendo... holy crap what is going through their brains.

The U is for 'Unenthusiasm'

Let me crap all over the Wii U for a moment. It may come as a surprise to none that the most played game on the Wii was Wii Sports, I've been to many households where Wii Sports was the only game owned and likely to be owned by the residents. The game allowed for families and friends to play together in their living rooms, laughing and cajoling, accidentally punching each other in the face. The Wii U doesn't allow for that, it has one controller and rumour has it only one controller can be used with each console at a time. So no more of that playful bounding and arm waving, Nintendo has returned to the same stereotype they were so chest puffing proud to escape, the loan couch bound game dweller; oh and on that note the Wii Vitality Sensor was a no show again this year. A major game blogger asked the Nintendo rep at E3, jokingly, if he could take the screen baring controller to the toilet so he could keep playing away from the tv, the rep answered probably not, as the range would be too far. Not good news at all. As for the games, every single one of them is a remake or a sequel or adaptation of a game that's currently in development. I watched a horribly hollow news piece on E3 with an aged Australian reporter looking as out of place as sober man at a 24 hour McDonalds after midnight as he combed the floor, he'd even untucked his Hugo Boss shirt. The only thing he really covered was the Wii U, culminating with a comment from a large man with a red beard and a fanny pack who giggled and hopped from foot to foot as he played some Wii party game. When asked what it was like he said, 'like nothing I've ever seen before'.... um, what? Has he never been to an Apple shop? Has he never seen a smart phone? Did he miss the Sony event the day before where they showed the Vita, which all ready looks like a better version of the Wii U remote?

The best game not at E3

So what's going on? Is it the economy, is everyone adopting the Activision 'flog it to death and then some' franchise model just to survive? Are we just too complacent, too susceptable to the market testing telling us what we want and then making us ask for more? Has the idea well just plain run dry, the innovative people just packed their bags and gone home to work on iPhone games and be their own boss and make a fortune? Maybe all these things. There were a few exciting things to come out of E3, the most innovative game this century Minecraft, is coming to the 360 and may incorporate Kinect, Journey and Child of Eden, two genuinely interesting games got a bit of coverage, but these things tended to be drowned out by loud campaigns for military shooter games. There were more arguements about which looked better, Call of Duty or Battlefield, than there were frank discussions about why we even wanted to play games almost identical to games we were playing six months ago. Or fight about games that looked almost identical to each other.

For me this E3 has left the future looking pretty bleak. First person shooters have just about squeezed the last drop of orginality they could out of their structure but it looks like we're a long way off moving to greener pastures, not when the best selling games every year feature iron sights and death matches. Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm just bitter there wasn't even a single mention of the Last Guardian during the entire E3. The event has just left me feeling pretty hollow about gaming, there was a bunch of news about games I all ready new I was going to get, Skyrim, Assassins Creed, Gears of War 3, and no news about what might be coming up next.

If I was really pessimistic, if I wanted to suggest a possible doomsday scenario for gamers (which I'm now totally going to), this is the begginning of the end. There's too much money in games and not enough creativity, the people who make games are getting treated like crap and pushed around by the people who finance and sell the games, we read about it every day. This E3 is pretty telling that the big names in games aren't thinking forward, so much as they're thinking about squeezing as much cash out of the consumers as they can as fast as they can. We're heading for a games industry bust and there's a good chance the current Xbox and Playstation are the last iterations of the consoles we'll see. At least in this format. I'm sure all the players are looking at On Live very closely and wondering and doing some intensive cost estimates. The question then is if people are going to pay multiple subscriptions for multiple game provider services and I'd hazard a no. There will be a major winner and several losers who will go bust and back out of games and go back to making software, televisions or card games. Next years E3 could be very interesting or very scary.

I'll give it another year, but if E3 2012 is completely absent in innovation again, if I learn that two million people signed up for Call of Duty Elite or the Wii U becomes the best selling console of all time, then I'm going back to comic collecting.