The old is more exciting than the new
Videogames are horribly trend-driven at the moment. The cool new ideas are so damn cool that everyone's rushing to share in the same coolness as everyone else. And as any elitist will tell you, that makes cool things very uncool indeed. So obsessed is the industry with user-generated, fully connected, community-driven, digitally distributed, Naruto-licensed brown and grey co-op shooters for the expanded casual market that it's actually brilliantly refreshing when a videogame is happy just to be a videogame.
Capcom were our boys for that this year. In Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5, Mega Man 9 and Bionic Commando: Rearmed we had a collection of unashamed, unpretentious 'proper' games that were bright, brash, just wanted to make us happy, and had their roots back in the days when gaming was all about that philosophy. Hats off to you sirs, hats very much off. If Nintendo had actually bothered to show off Wario Land Shake at its conference, it could have shared in some of this glory. But no. It didn't and so it can't.
Videogame execs shouldn't be allowed on stage any more
Seriously, cut the pie charts and just let GLaDOS introduce all the game footage.
The most earth-shattering announcement of the show was a port of an already-known game which probably barely even exists yet
Final Fantasy XIII moving to the Xbox 360 was big news, but we can't help feeling that in previous years it would have been just one jewel in the E3 crown. As it turned out, it was the only talking point which earned more than five minutes discussion. An FMV sequence with a new platform logo shouldn't overshadow the whole rest of the show, surely?
The future relevence - and existence - of E3 is more uncertain than ever
Since E3's downsizing, journalist and gamer enthusiasm for the show has been disipating faster than a mouse fart in a hurricane. The decidedly subdued nature of the event this year, coupled with the quiet popping of damp squib announcements throughout, now has media and public alike wondering if it's all worth the effort. Increasingly prolific, company-specific showcase events aren't helping the pro-E3 cause one little bit.
The under-abundance of booth babes at E3 '08 can be seen as a crass yet poignant metaphor, like the rats leaving a sinking ship. And most worrying of all - or not, depending on your perspective - the traditionally printed date of next year's event has been absent from the show's banners this time around. Leipzig and Tokyo Game Show, do not fail us this year.
