Top 7... E3 2014 no-shows

Whatever happened to Sony’s third instalment in the ICO trilogy? The game appears to be stuck in development hell; caught between console generations and fraught with an irresolvable tension between creative aspiration and technical limitations. Either that, or ex-Sony President Jack Tretton borrowed it back in January and forgot to return it before he left the company.

Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. At the Sony Christmas party last year, Shuhei Yoshida got a bit squiffy on gin and gave Tretton the only copy of The Last Guardian. Jack took it home, and put it on his gaming shelf. But then he started playing Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and just forgot to play The Last Guardian. When he left Sony in March, no-one thought to ask for the Blu-ray back. Jack has promised to bring it over to the office at some point, but his wife tidied it into a box and put it in the garage somewhere. Hmm… maybe its in with those awful old curtains from the spare room.

Oh Rockstar--how you teased us all with the news that you’re going to release a ‘new-generation console game’ before 2015. Given your rhetoric of developing your IP, we hoped and prayed that a Red Dead Redemption sequel would be the centrepiece of someone’s E3 press conference.

Rumour has it that Red Dead 2 is still a long way off, though, with Rockstar reportedly turning all its development resources to creating a perfectly made, photorealistic version of Eddie Murphy’s 1992 film Boomerang. “At the moment, we’re really trying to nail that bit in the film where Grace Jones pulls off her pants and shoves them into the perfume geek’s face,” said a source at Rockstar that I just made up.

Several leaked images of the logo suggested that we’d see a sequel to steampunk stealth adventure Dishonored at E3 2014. Indeed, Bethesda itself implied that there would be a significant reveal at the show, leading many to surmise that Dishonored 2 was a dead cert. Sadly, Dishonored 2 may never happen.

Back in 1994, when he was a young man, Bethesda CEO Pete Hines was cursed by an old gypsy woman from Hull. He was told that in 2012, his company would release a game called Dishonored, which would be about rats and stabbing. However, Hines would never be able to green-light a sequel, no matter how much he wanted it. Despite wearing a necklace with a dead frog on it, and burying a goat called Jeff in his back garden under a full moon, Hines has been unable to break the curse. So, no Dishonored sequel.

While Epic is now finished with Gears of War, Microsoft has bought the franchise and handed it to new studio, Black Tusk. Given the impact the original game had on Xbox 360 sales, many anticipated a new-gen Gears at Microsoft’s press conference. And it would have been there, if not for an outbreak of a debilitating virus at the Black Tusk development studio.

The disease--known as Woahbroitis--affects the victim’s hand/eye coordination, leaving them physically unable to render burly space-marines within a game engine. The infection is passed via high-fiving, and spread quickly through the Black Tusk offices after one employee picked it up at a baseball game. Microsoft considered replacing all the space-marines with feminist icons from the early 20th century, but decided that would go against the ‘core values’ of the series.

Like that kid at school with glandular fever, Half-Life 3 just never shows up. Ever. There’s little doubt its in development at Valve, but the legendary development studio is notorious for taking its time with games, and was clearly unprepared to show it at this year’s E3. Or was it?

According to a report from someone I don’t know, he was sat next to Valve head honcho, Gabe Newell, on the plane travelling to LA on the Sunday before the conferences. Gabe was in high-spirits, admitting to his fellow passenger that he’d “decided to finally give the fans what they want”. He brandished a dirty USB memory stick with Half-Life 3, crudely written on it. Sadly, though, at the airport he was stopped by an overzealous Immigration Official, and in the confusion, the memory stick was chewed up by a drug-dog who thought it was a crackpipe.

Another year goes by, another batch of games I expected to see fail to appear. I suppose it's my own fault--I should have known that some of these requests were too good to be true. I need to stop getting so overexcited... until next year.

And if you're interested in more, check out what this year's E3 would have been like in 1994 and 100 games you might have missed at E3.