E3 2017 Roundup: Sony

With Nintendo out of the way it's time to look at Sony and what they brought to the table for E3 2017.  At last year's show, Sony redefined how E3 press conferences should be performed with a classy presentation that had little to no down time.  An opening live orchestral performance that led into the world premier of the new God of War game set the mood and the lack of company execs and developers giving idle pleasantries kept the audience energy at a constant high as game after game after game was shown off.  In addition to God of War other titles such as Resident Evil VII and Insomniac Games' new Spider Man were revealed.  A handful of brand new IP's even premiered in the forms of Days Gone, Detroit: Become Human, and Hideo Kojima's much anticipated project Death Stranding.  This all culminated in one of the most well received press conferences in E3 history and Sony aimed to replicate that success by using the same conference format for 2017.  The difference: not nearly as many new titles announced and not a single new IP beyond small VR games.  However, as we saw with Nintendo a lack of new announcements doesn't necessarily make for a bad conference but what we will see is that it certainly won't reach the same high as last year's did.

E3 2017 Roundup: Nintendo

Now that the biggest gaming trade-show of the year has wrapped up it's time to take a look back at what's been shown off and how much of a splash these announcements made.  To kick it all off I'm going to start with Nintendo's showcase.  This was the first E3 for Nintendo's new console and, as I mentioned in my pre-launch piece for the Switch, would prove to be a pivotal showing for it.  This was Nintendo's chance to really sell the Switch with solid first party support that will court relations with third-party developers in the future.  All in all, Nintendo has a solid performance at E3 but it also felt like they were treading water a bit, not really pushing the boundary of expectations.  Let's break down their showcase game-by-game and and see what each brings to the table.

Sympathy & Empathy [VIDEO!!]

So I follow a handful of game and anime journalist groups on the web and I've always admired the polish and professionalism these outlets put into their video content.  When Memorial Day weekend rolled around I thought, "Screw it.  I've got a three day weekend, let's try turning one of my blog posts into a video."  Now you can skip the rest of this post and go straight to the video if you want but I want to use this space to talk about the process and my experience while making my first video ever.

Truthfully I would have rather turned one of my video game articles into a video but that would have required me capturing game footage and I have no way to do that without going out and buying a peripheral.  So I decided to do one of my anime pieces instead since I could relatively easily acquire video clips for those.  From there it was a matter of deciding which anime article to use.  In the end I settled on my "Sympathy & Empathy" article because it is the one that I feel most proud about and is also one of my most received pieces.  I would later come to realize that I was biting of a little more than I could chew by choosing this piece.