Three Es, Three Games

Every year, games companies gather together in LA at the Electronics Entertainment Expo and cross their fingers as they show off what they’ve been coding away diligently at all year long. For some, like big shots Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, things go mostly like any planned spectacle, with flashing lights, irrelevant music acts, and fairly predictable announcements for sequels of games already out. But for smaller developers, things are way more up in the air, especially when your crowd is a bunch of gamers for whom #fail is saved in their keyboard macros.

This year, amidst the half dozen new FPS and yawns, there were a few standouts that promise something genuinely cool, if they can live up to it.

• Published by Bethesda but released by the newly-acquired Arkane team, Dishonored looks like the kind of game that begs for awesome detail in every nook and cranny. A steampunk, new-Victorian, stealth, assassination, magic and machine mish-mash that looks drop-dead gorgeous, Dishonored seems to take gameplay cues from Their, Assassin’s Creed, Skyrim and BioShock. Take a good look at the trailer videos and try not to love it.
• With lots of buzz and a bit of contention, the lads who run the Yogscast gaming video channel, made famous due to their Minecraft videos, have raised a trailer full of cash on Kickstarter to develop their own game, Yogventures. The games takes the environment building and custom mods and playthrough mechanic to heart, allowing players to both make and release their own custom maps. It will inevitably face comparisons to Minecraft’s massive community about who’s stealing from who, but the idea of community-made mods and maps has kept even mediocre games alive long past their sell-by date, so that can only work in the guys’ favor here.
• A blast from a past where games had no mercy on players and death meant gruesome, permanent death, X-COM is one of those titles that, for those who played it, has immediate resonance. The game is back now, in a new shiny package, though still just as turn-based, just as tense, and just as threatening to your precious characters. Aliens are invading the earth, and it’s up to you to find them, and stop them, if you can. An instant classic.