And so another E3 has come and gone. Hello, Enthusiacs. I am Goose and today I’m going to ask a simple question: Did E3 do its job? The answer is mixed  to say the least, so we have to go show by show and look at the good and bad and the why.

With that in mind, we begin with Electronic Arts. Let’s be honest, we all cringe just a little when we think about EA at E3, and this year was no exception. Just like the last few years, you get the feeling that EA doesn’t understand the audience of their presentation.

The focus on sports really came to the forefront as their main issue this year, with over forty minutes devoted to Madden and Fifa. Sadly the emphasis was not on the games, of course, but on EA’s continued egotism at their own brand of “E-Sports”

Now I’m not going to go so far as to say that only the “dude-bro” demographic play these games. However, I will say that they appear to be the exclusive audience that EA thinks play these games. While watching them talk to the “fans” you begin to realize that we are a fist pump away from the Jersey Shore.

Other than sports, what did EA bring to bare?  The answer is same old shit, different E3. A preview of the next Mass Effect game that, much like the last two years, tells us nothing and makes us want the game less, not more. A Star Wars segment that spends a third of its time on their mobile app, and more importantly makes us wonder if they have anything new in the pipeline. Other than a man walking out of a door in a desert, we had no footage of any title beyond BattleFront.

So going back to our question: Did EA’s E3 do it’s job? The answer is no. We left with way too many questions and not enough answers. “EA Original”s was the most thought provoking thing they had and they just glanced over it with no real information as to what it really is or what it means to gamers in general.

Now the next show was Bethesda and from EA to here, the difference was night and day. Bethesda is known for a good E3 show. Rather than focusing on themselves, they focused on why we were watching: the games. Doom, Fallout, and ever Dishonored were given large amounts of focus and honestly looked really good.  However, upon rewatching it, I can’t help but ask myself if the reason it seemed so good was the contrast of the EA’s show being so fresh in the viewers mind.

Sure, Fallout and Doom DLC look fun and all, but as per our earlier question: Did Bethesda’s E3 show do it’s job? The answer is, technically, yes. However, I feel like they could have done a better job focusing their show as they seemed to be all over the place. I liked what I saw, yes, but it could have been presented better.

Now we jump to day two, and before we talk about the show I need to address the elephant in the room. From this point on each show opened with a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando shootings. Now look, this is an extremely heavy topic, and one on which I am quite frankly not qualified to discuss, but I feel like it came across as more awkward than honorable. I get what they were trying to do, however, the execution ranged from awkward to downright disrespectful. Ubisoft in particular took things in a direction that should never have been done. I’m not going to go through each show’s version, but I felt like it needed to be brought up. I am going to drop it now.

Microsoft was next and the start of day two. If you took a shot everytime you heard the phrase “exclusive to Xbox 1 and Windows 10” you would be piss drunk in 30 minutes. Never mind the fact that that is not how “exclusive” works. Microsoft was very samey. Much of what we saw we saw before, aside from the slim Xbone. The Xbox S with all its terrafloppy goodness was really all the new stuff they had. I can honestly say I had no more desire to own an Xbone after the show as I did before so to answer our question a third time: no Microsoft did not do its job.

Moving on to Ubisoft, I feel like they try every year to become and bigger and bigger joke. I feel bad because I honestly believe they are trying the best they can. However, the show just comes off as awkward. The entire Ubisoft formula seem to be biting them in the ass. All their games look like the same ideas with a new paint job. “Open world,” “Sandbox,” it’s all the same. In fact, the only things that caught my interest where South Park and Star Trek VR.

So the answer to our question is yes and no in the case of Ubisoft, but if I might sidebar for a bit. Ubisoft’s biggest problem is that they seem to focus on trying to be funny and failing hard. Aisha Tyler is trying, God bless her, but she seems like she’s just trying to hard to seem into it rather than just being real.

Finally we have Sony, which blew us away with game after game, real exclusives, and most importantly, a focus on game play and not just CGI trailers with no context. Sony not only did their job, but they did better than everyone else at E3 this year. I walked away so excited for the future of Sony way more than I did for everyone else.

And that was E3 2016. Overall it was better than last year but that’s not saying much. Hopefully next year we can sing the praises of all the developers and can avoid the pratfalls of this year.

Until next time I have been Goose, your host.

Thank you for reading.