The ‘Nope!’ Award for Immediately Regretted Decisions: Alien: Isolation
I haven’t really been following Alien: Isolation, so I was pleased when I got to play it and discovered just how faithful it is to the spirit of the original movie. I was exploring a creepy space station while a deadly monster hunted me. At one point, I went inside a locker, mostly just for kicks. A second later, I saw the alien walk by through the little cracks inside. I was legitimately terrified.
After a while, I thought I was safe to make my escape. I left the locker, turned to my right, saw the alien standing 20 feet away from and looking the other way. I turned around and went right back in. This garnered a pretty big laugh from those watching behind me.
Of course, the alien soon walked by my locker again, heard me breathing, tore down the door, and ate me. And I loved every second of it. — Mike Minotti
The Most Disturbingly Catchy Song Award: Dead Island 2 announcement trailer
When the first Dead Island game arrived, it left a lot of people wondering what a game about running around in a bikini hitting zombies with planks of wood had to do with that amazing and moving trailer that everyone had been talking about.
We got another cinematic trailer when Dead Island 2 appeared during Sony’s briefing, and its creators seem to have anticipated the confusion. This was a funny, bright, and high-energy little movie that is probably closer in tone and content to what we’ll actually see than what we came to expect from the first game, and to cap it all off, it had a really cool song playing under it: “The Bomb” by Pigeon John.
It was almost too effective, though, because I can’t get that track out of my head now, and I can’t hear it without thinking of body parts falling from a man. It’s not the best association, even when you factor in that the song’s basically “Rockin’ Robin” with more bass.
Regardless, the Dead Island 2 trailer still serves as a better and more entertaining music video than the song’s official one, and I appreciate it for that. — Evan Killham
The Biggest Affront to Schadenfreude Award: The press briefings
E3 just doesn’t feel the same without some untrained public speakers walking out onstage and delivering poorly scripted banter terribly to a largely mortified crowd. Hell, it was so common last year that we had to collect them all in one place. As I sat down to watch this year’s events, I prepared myself to cringe and be generally glad I work at home and not in front of people.
But then nothing happened.
This year’s briefings were ridiculously on-point, well-focused, and free of incidents that made me wish I could Eternal Sunshine them right out of my brain. It was kind of terrible for someone like me. Sure, people playing multiplayer don’t actually sound like the canned banter from the demos for Rainbow Six: Siege and The Division, but you can’t make an animated GIF out of that shit.
My hopes rose temporarily when Nintendo’s digital event started with an insane anime fight between chief Satoru Iwata and Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, but unfortunately, that was entirely awesome.
Damn it. — Evan Killham
The ‘Nice Trick, Asshole’ Award: Fenix Rage
Just a few levels into the brutally tough and addictive 2D platformer, Fenix Rage (described as “Super Meat Boy meets Sonic” for the PS4, Xbox One, PC), I was stuck. The PR guy watching me had just a tiniest hint of a smirk on his face. “Want me to tell you the secret?” he asked. After a few more attempts to scale up a deep well lined with black globs of death, I gave up and asked for help.
“You don’t have to wall-jump,” said Anthony Chau, the director of PR for Reverb Communications (representing the developer, Green Lava Studio).
Above: It has “rage” in the title for a reason.
Turned out the game’s creator set that stage up to mess with gamers, knowing that most of us would instinctively leap off one wall to latch on to the other side and then bounce back and forth (and upward) until they could get out. After all, that’s what we’d do in Super Mario Bros., the aforementioned Super Meat Boy, and, well, just about every other modern platformer we’ve ever played — it’s a well-ingrained move by now. But that doesn’t work here (even though it feels like it should), and the solution is much, much simpler: Just fly right up the middle. Your main character doesn’t need to leap off any walls because he can “air jump” indefinitely.
It was the developer’s way of screwing with our preprogrammed gamer minds and teach us a new technique for his game at the same time. I’d say it’s rather clever — except I would probably still be at the demo station trying to figure it out if it weren’t for Chau’s help. — Dan “Shoe” Hsu