E3 Week: My Reactions to the Square Enix Live Stream

I didn’t know what to expect going into this one. I had two predictions; one of which was that a significant portions would be taken up by Kingdom Hearts III, the other was that Final Fantasy VII was going to get delayed for another couple years. I was wrong on both counts in the end. They didn’t mention the FF remake at all.

Square Enix’s press conference wasn’t a press conference at all. Instead, they decided to go down the Nintendo route and pre-record the whole thing before peacing out. I was kind of thankful for that to be honest. that meant this whole thing could be reduced down a snappy 30 minutes, and we didn’t have to take up precious seconds on awkward almost-applause. I’m probably showing my hand slightly here, but I’m not a massive fan of Square’s games. But I’m ready to be wrong at any given moment…

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E3 Week: My Reactions to the Bethesda Press Conference

Bethesda are my good-will publisher. It’s a company full of people who seem to genuinely care about what they’re doing, and consequently they put out very good games on a consistent basis. That being said, I always find myself wondering what they could possibly find to show year after year on their stage. Time and time again they tend to shut me up and put on a good show. So I’m looking forward to whatever we see here.

My high hopes were tested to begin with, as it took 15 to 20 minutes for the presentation to actually get started, bringing out a few different faces on their weird stage and Having Andrew W.K. perform a song to a relatively underwhelmed/perplexed audience. Eventually the show did get started though. Here’s what I thought of it.

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E3 Week: My Highlights from the Microsoft Xbox Press Conference

After the EA conference felt like a company floundering for something to put on stage, and then subsequently not actually making an effort once the stuff was up there. Microsoft came out like a company with something to prove. True, they are trailing behind Sony and the PS4 in terms of sales and install base, but Microsoft also have their fingers in the PC space, so it’s not like they’re desperate…

I’m not going to break down the entire conference for Microsoft like I did for EA, there was far too much on display here and a lot of it I don’t have a strong opinion about, or there wasn’t simply enough there before jumping to the next thing to say anything about it other than stating it’s a thing. So I’m going to go down my notes and talk about the things I felt the strongest about, in either a positive or negative light. So let’s get started.

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