GamesRadar's E3 2012 Important Stuff Awards

It’s a fact of life that rock ‘n roll can improve anything and that includes games. The stellar mix of a surf rock jam and platforming in Rayman Legends was one of the best things we played at E3 (even better than Mario Wii U). Jumps were timed perfectly to the music and when we reached the end, we were treated to a well-deserved guitar solo that made us feel like rock stars.

Runner-up: Rock Band Blitz

From big budget sci-fi to quirky indies and pitch black comedy, it seems like Ellen Page has done all Hollywood has to offer. Now David Cage, with his upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive Beyond: Two Souls, is giving audiences a side of the young actress we’ve never seen. A story that will span 15 years in character Jodie’s life, we’ll see miss Ms. Page grow, both physically and mentally, into the telekinetic fugitive that we saw on the run from a SWAT team in our first demo. Cage’s Jodie is mocapped to Page-like perfection, easily outshining Sony’s other brunette Page-alike.

Runner-up: Girl from The Last of Us

Dishonored showed the quintessential way of playing out an assassination. You bring an arsenal of stabby weapons and supernatural powers to a specific location, find a way to the target, and then stick a few holes in them or mind control them off a balcony. It’s all up to you how you approach the mission in Dishonored. The demo we saw and wrote a Dishonored preview about showed off two ways of executing the act, one involved being a stealthy ghost while the other was a walking bloodbath.

Runner up: Assassin’s Creed III

Honorable mention: Hitman: Ascension

New IPs come along so rarely, and when they do, they can sometimes feel like a clone of a successful franchise. A Gears-like shooter, another open world RPG, why even bother? This is exactly why Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs got us (and everyone else at E3, really) so excited. A seedy cyberpunk tale set in a grounded-in-reality near future? Glimpses of an urban landscapes that might rival GTA for on-the-street realism? A brutal, unforgiving anti-hero who uses digital trickery to manipulate the world around him (and a skull cracking baton when things get hairy)? Sign us up. Sign us up twice.

Runner-up: Beyond

It wasn’t the “blowing someone’s head off.” And seeing someone’s eyes turn red and bulge out out as the very life is choked out of him was pretty tough to swallow. But among the graphic and unpretty violence that drives the “survive and protect at all costs” nature of Naughty Dog’s demo, it was the moment at which Joel bludgeons a Hunter to death with a stray brick that gave us a case of Screwface. It’s a year in which games seem to be mediating more on the rawness of wounding the human body (witness runner-up) than on shooting faceless grunts, and The Last of Us exemplified it more than any other title at E3.

Runner-up: Lara Croft stepping into a bear trap

Maybe it’s a cliché to have slow, panning shots of violence underscored by lo-fi music, but no other trailer this year used that trope to such effectiveness as ZombiU. Set to the anthem God Save the Queen, it showcased the horrifying circumstances of the Wi U exclusive while it simultaneously reinforced the British setting. As you'll see in our hands-on preview, the game can stand on its own, but just watch this and see if you don’t get goosebumps.

Runner-up: Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2

Harmonix’s John Drake sums it up better than we could: “The way we justified doing dance moves from the 70s and 80s was to do a very complicated story mode with time travel. Because, that is what a videogame that is sequel to a casual dance game needs, is a time travel story mechanic. You are part of Dance Central Intelligence, you’re fighting dance crimes, you’re going back in time to rescue crews full of other agents trapped in the past. More on that to come later.”

Dance crimes? No, seriously, can you come up with a better idea? We don’t wanna hear it.

Runner-up: Assassin's Creed III

Conner rushes the British army alone using both a horse and a British Regular as bullet shields, kills a dozen more soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, shoots a general while flying through the air, then buries a hatchet into his chest - all while inspiring the Colonial army to push the English back to the sea. If you weren’t inspired to play the game after reading our Assassin’s Creed III preview, you definitely were after watching that trailer.

Runner up: South Park: Stick of Truth

After making big plans for the future of Wii U in 2011, the almost total absence of EA properties during this year’s Nintendo press conference was odd. The only evidence of support was the incredibly brief appearance of Mass Effect 3 during a sizzle reel, which got a positive audience reaction that Nintendo merely glossed over. In a press conference that was starving for hardcore games, Nintendo failure to bring EA on stage baffled us.

Runner-up: EA's UFC partnership

Maybe it’s our fault for mistakenly thinking Nintendo wanted to play to their base this year, but we expected a huge closer to the N’s press conference. Nintendo seems to think the virtual amusement park Nintendo Land fits that description, but after it hit the stage with a thud, we beg to differ. The actual game is a fun distraction (as we explain in our preview), but when you’re expecting a new Zelda or Smash Bros, a cutesy minigame collection isn’t going to cut it.

Runner-up: The lack of Vita news during Sony presser

Sony’s press conference was clearly on a roll after premiering Beyond: Two Souls and Assassin’s Creed III naval battles, but that momentum died when they pulled out Move. Soon the stage was occupied with Wonderbook, and though the whimsical AR wonder might be better in person, the live demo was full of cringe-worthy gaffes, making the showcase of the already boring virtual pop-up book last an eternity. The endless Wonderbook demonstration made us yearn for child actors playing Kinect.

Runner-up: Nintendo Land

The pre-E3 screenshots we saw of Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 were impressive, but seeing the engine’s visuals in motion was utterly stunning . UE4 is all about realistic lightning – an element that enhances graphics in such a subtle, organic way that it makes current-gen environments look hollow and artificial. The taste we got of UE4 million-light-particle power has us salivating over what the engine can do for tomorrow’s games – if the character models look this good, full-on realism can’t be far behind.

Runner-up: Watch Dogs

Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, God of War: Ascension, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Splinter Cell Blacklist, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Dead Space 3, SimCity, and Crysis 3. That list would make a pretty great holiday 2012 release schedule, yet that’s a sampling of the flood of games hitting us next spring. Thanks to all the delays, this November is looking pretty weak by comparison. Except for, you know, Halo 4 and Black Ops 2…

Runner-up: February

Injustice: Gods Among Us might not have Fatalities (since superheroes usually try not to kill people), but they have finishing moves that... well, yeah, they're Fatalities. They were all awesome in their own right, as we talked about in our Injustice preview but the Flash's might have been the coolest one we saw: he stuns his opponent, and then proceeds to run around the entire freaking world to empower a face punch. Seriously. Like, talk about a running start to end all running starts.

Runner up: Parappa punching a Big Daddy, just because

“We want new IPs,” they said. “We’re tired of sequels,” they said. And amidst plenty of 2s and 3s at E3, Ubisoft’s presentation of Watch Dogs immediately tapped into – dare we say – zeitgeist and grabbed us with a look in the mirror. We, as gamers, leave a massive digital footprint. Because Aiden can easily shine a light onto the sensitive information of those around him, there’s something empowering and eerie about it. Those people whose employment and health status he’s scanning? Might as well be any of us.

And that’s before the amazing and immersive look into this hackable Chicago. It’s got elements that remind us of Assassin’s Creed. It’s got a level of technological Superman that’s appealing. And, apparently, there’s going to be much more to it, from a social standpoint, than we’ve been shown?

Runner-up: Assassin’s Creed III

And that's a wrap! Odds are you think we're dumb and want to throw snowballs at us as we huddle behind a car and cry, but we've made our choices and we're sticking to them.

What do you think should have made the list? Are there are categories you would have added? If so, let us know in the comments below.

And if you want more E3 reactions, check out the top 7 E3 2012 no-shows and our Most Valuable Games of E3 2012.