E3: 1 (acronym) Electronic Entertainment Expo, 2 (geek) the sound I made this year when the new games were announced “EEE!!!!”

E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo, is a grand stage for the big three gaming companies and their third party developers to tease and brag about all the new tech and titles being released for the next few years. This year certainly didn’t disappoint.

Sony brought their A game this year. Seriously. It was amazing! My favorite announcement was that Sony and Square-Enix have finally remembered that they like money, and decided to remake the Playstation One smash hit title, Final Fantasy VII. FF7 is by far and away my favorite RPG (Roll Playing Game) ever, and ranks very high on my best game of all time short list.

Microsoft realized that most people who buy their Xbox One games, bought their Xbox 360 games, and so they announced that Xbox One would be able to play Xbox 360 games retroactively. This pleases me greatly (gotta have my Guitar Hero.)

The biggest Microsoft show piece was the new Hololens holographic computer. This tech is amazing! I was dumbstruck. A visor allows you to see and interact with holograms using gestures and voice controls. They even used it to play Minecraft! (revolutionary technology: What games can we play with it?)

Nintendo seemed to phone it in. For one thing, their announcers were all Muppet versions of themselves … literally. They were puppets. Kinda weird. They announced the new Star Fox game, but all they kept talking about was Mario’s anniversary and this construction game called “Mario Maker.” As fun as that may be, I don’t think it was enough to fill an epic E3 panel.

Honorable mention moment: Sony announced that the long awaited title, “Shenmue III,” would be crowd funded on Kickstarter. It reached its $2,000,000 goal in just nine hours, and as of writing this article, they had raised $3,600,00 in 10 days.

The future of gaming is bright indeed.

Class dismissed.

 

Jason Reeves is self-proclaimed geek tackling on the biggest issues from video games to movies and everything in between.