Steve, Susan, Mike, and Sarah are all back from E3 and, somewhere between catching up on sleep and fighting back the airplane travel plague, have each provided a top five, best of show list to tell you what caught their particular eye at this year’s Expo. Ranging from indie puzzlers to mainstream shooters, there were a ton of great games to preview out in Los Angeles, but only some could keep the Escapist staff thinking about them days after making it home.
Without further ado, here are the Escapist staff’s top five picks of E3!
Steve Butts: This year’s E3 was very much the calm before the storm. With so many publishers demoing console titles on high-end PCs, I can’t help but be a little skeptical that everything we’re seeing is as current gen as the marketing teams would like us to believe. But even if the industry is holding its collective breath in anticipation of new console announcements next year, there was still a lot of great stuff to love on the show floor.
Susan Arendt: A lot of people were grumbling about E3 this year. Too many shooters. Too much emphasis on death. I’m not sure those people attended the same event I did. There were plenty of ways to get your gun on, to be sure, and the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 trailer’s ability to halt huge numbers of people mid-stride probably qualifies it as some kind of riot control, but there was more on the floor than just 31 flavors of bang bang. In that spirit, I present to you my five favorite games of E3 that didn’t have guns.
Mike Kayatta: E3 is doing fine on “E”s without my help, but I am going to throw one more at it anyway: Expectation. The entire show revolves around expectations, from what people thought they were going to see, to what they were sure was going to be fantastic or miserable, to what they just knew they were going to fall in love with before even stepping onto the show floor. And while there’s no avoiding walking through the doors without any of these thoughts jumping around your brain, the show itself does a grand job of chucking most of what you’d come expecting right out the window. That being said, there were more than a few games that surprised me, either with an impressive quality, or a distinctive lack thereof.
Sarah LeBoeuf: As awesome as E3 is, it’s also completely overwhelming. With hundreds of upcoming games ranging from the biggest triple-A to the smallest indie, it’s hard to keep track of everything I saw on the show floor. Now that I’ve put a few days (and 3,000 miles) between me and the Los Angeles Convention Center, it’s easier to figure out what games were truly memorable. These are the five games I’m still thinking about, talking about, and wishing were already out.
