It may come as no surprise to anyone that we love being excited about games and this year’s E3 had plenty of those and then some. Here are the handful of titles we saw at the show that made us excited for this year and beyond.
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Seven years ago, Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola took the modern board gaming world by storm, winning award after award and entrenching itself firmly atop the BoardGameGeek.com ratings, where it still resides comfortably as the third highest-rated game of all time. Its not flawless by any means, and many gamers opt to not even use the best — and to be fair, most complicated — aspect of the game: the occupation and minor improvement cards. The “family game” version sacrifices variability for simplicity, but loses little to none of the worker-placement struggle to avoid starvation as you develop your own farm. Now Rosenberg has revisited many of his Agricola mechanics for a sequel of sorts in Caverna: The Cave Farmers, which eliminates the cards altogether to provide one unified experience. READ MORE
Remember E3 2012? Okay, yeah, you probably don’t. It was the year before the announcement of the now-current generation of consoles, leaving us with another slew of games for our old machines and ultimately turning the show into a bit of a slog as a result. One game stood out and surprised just about everyone though, and that game was Watch Dogs. It was a brand new, original title from Ubisoft, and the reveal trailer was something to behold.
Not only did it seem like the first “next generation” title technically, it was conceptually brilliant as well. Sure, some groaned when Aiden, the main character, inevitably pulled out a gun to deal with some adversaries, but the potential for something different was there.
One of the biggest headline Xbox One exclusives shown off by Microsoft this week was Sunset Overdrive. The main reasons the game has been getting attention are its bright color palette and energetic gameplay. Also, it’s being developed by Insomniac Games, whose work up until this point has been almost entirely exclusive to PlayStation platforms. That’s all well and good, but there was something about the teaser trailer shown at Microsoft’s briefing this year that struck me in a very unexpected way. Not anything specifically about the game, but instead a line spoken by its protagonist:
“Can you survive the many dangers? Can you help others survive? Can you save Sunset City? Can you? For the love of God, can you? Of course you can – it’s a f–– video game.” READ MORE
Now that the show’s over, how did our predictions fare? Read on to find out, and see who took the title in this year’s overall challenge!
