Essential E3 Trailers

Happy E3, you lucky people! It’s that time of the year when everyone settles down to watch the executives of multi-billion dollar entertainment enterprises give horribly stilted performances on stage, jigging about like marionettes plastered with smiles so false it’s amazing they don’t simply soil themselves with the muscular effort of maintaining them. It’s the time when the games industry throws its collective poo against the wall, arguing over who flung the hardest and highest.

And it’s also the time for trailers! Don’t you love the word?

The Last of Us

If you’re anything like me, and by that I mean the kind of paranoid who can’t live in a city without a zombie/apocalypse escape plan and several back-ups, here’s a little trailer that should calm the voices for a moment while you watch someone else struggle to survive in a dying world. Taking more than a few cues from The Road, Naughty Dog’s latest, The Last of Us, stars a grizzled action hero voiced by Nolan North — let’s call him Drathan Nake — escorting a child through a blasted and eerie cityscape, presumably to safety.

Naughty Dog promises enemies who react intelligently to your preferred combat style, scavenging and survival gameplay and a setting that poses as much of a challenge as the human dangers dogging your journey. From the trailer, it’s clear that it offers a distinct experience from the horror titles that have monopolized the survival label until now.

Assassin’s Creed III

I’ve got to be honest, I’m not entirely convinced that the American Revolutionary War is the kind of historical setting that’s going to resonate with an audience that didn’t grow up making dewy-eyed pledges to a starry flag in the classroom, but this trailer goes a long way to making US nationalism a little less ridiculous in my eyes. Fuck you, British guys! Wait…

Watch Dogs

This game is something of a rarity at E3, a completely new IP that appears to be deep in development while still shrouded in an intriguing air of mystery. Developed by Ubisoft Montreal, previously responsible for various Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia iterations, Watch Dogs appears to be some kind of futuristic espionage thriller. The trailer is a delicious slice of neo-noir silliness, married to some footage of a developer wandering around aimlessly. Magic.

Halo 4

Microsoft may well have had the worst, most eye-humpingly excruciating presser in the history of terrible R&B and Kinect-shilling, but you know what? Shut up. They also had a two-and-half-minute-long episode of Battlestar Galactica.

Star Wars 1313

Okay, so it’s less than a minute long. But seeing as the last truly good Star Wars title, Republic Commando, was released way back in 2005, any game set in a galaxy far, far away that shows even a glimmer of possibility is going to get folk squawking like chickens. 1313 is at least not making the same mistakes as The Force Unleashed, steering you away from playing as a frustratingly over-powered magic space monk, and instead into the role of a morally-flexible bounty hunter. Only time will tell if that’s enough to overcome the layers of grime that have built up around one of the most-abused series in gaming history.