E3: The year of meh!

THEY CALL E3 THE ‘SU­PERBOWL OF GAM­ING’. IT’S SUP­POSED TO BE THE AN­NUAL SHOW­CAS­ING OF ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAU­TI­FUL ABOUT VIDEOGAMES—THE TIME WHEN THE IN­DUS­TRY PUTS ITS BEST FACE FOR­WARD, AND TELLS US ALL ABOUT THE AMAZ­ING STUFF WE CAN EX­PECT IN THE MONT

Gadgets and Gizmos (India) - - CONTENTS - BY ANAND RA­MACHAN­DRAN

The fizz and the siz­zle were miss­ing at this year’s E3, the big­gest expo in the world of gam­ing. At Los Angeles, there was nei­ther in­no­va­tion nor an­nounce­ments of ex­cit­ing new ti­tles and de­vices.

Well, this year, you could say that E3 was a dis­ap­point­ment over­all. And you would be cor­rect. It’s not that there weren’t any cool games or ideas that were shown at Los Angeles this year— there un­doubt­edly were. But over­all, the vibe was that the en­tire in­dus­try was more or less play­ing it safe—se­quels, eye-candy, gim­micks and a gen­er­ally con­ser­va­tive at­ti­tude seemed to per­vade the show. It was like the whole in­dus­try, in a col­lec­tive voice, was say­ing “Let’s do what we do best—milk fran­chises, continue the graph­ics arms race, make ev­ery­thing more vi­o­lent.” For the adren­a­line-seek­ing fan­boy crowd, it was just fine. For the rest of us, who are look­ing for signs that gam­ing is ma­tur­ing and grow­ing into a se­ri­ous art form, there seemed to be lit­tle hope. Mostly (with a few no­table ex­cep­tions, of course), it seemed to be a con­test of who could put more bullets, blood and boobs into their games.

At a time when con­fer­ences like GDC (the Game De­vel­op­ers Con­fer­ence) seem to ac­tively fos­ter a cli­mate of in­no­va­tion

Mi­crosoft showed us the next Halo and Gear­sofWar games. Both look great.

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