E3 2019: Microsoft’s Best Trailers
I just emerged from Microsoft’s E3 presentation, and I’m exhausted. When you have to watch 60 game trailers in a row, the cliches tend to blend together after a while. “Let’s see, is this about a post-apocalyptic magic cyborg trapped in a time loop with Keanu Reeves while being chased by a giant Lego Battletoad? No….it’s Gears 5….”
Fortunately, you are not me and you get to enjoy my pruning of this mess down to its most interesting and most essential items. Here are the best trailers from Microsoft’s XBox show:
I’m not an XBox owner, mostly because its exclusives rarely interest me, but one of the XBox games I’ve been most tempted by is the Ori series. This new game, which was revealed last year, looks excellent. It’s coming February 11, 2020.
With the lack of Telltale in this world, it’s up to Microsoft themselves to get adventurous with the Minecraft brand. They know better than to mess with the original, but they’re willing to experiment with spinoffs. It’s a four-player co-op adventure and it arrives Spring 2020.
Remember when someone came out with that viral movie trailer and everyone was interested in what it was, and it turned out to be a stealth reveal for a new Blair Witch movie? Same deal here. This man and his dog are looking for a missing kid. The dog runs off, the man gets lost, he wanders through the woods toward a broken-down cabin while breathing heavily….wait a minute, why didn’t we catch on before the title reveal? We’s dumb.
Now this looks super-cool. We don’t know exactly how you play it, but we love that faux-anime style and how well the programmers have bended the polygons to mimic 2D animation.
After years of empty promises and teasers, we finally have an actual look at the Battletoads game. And they did what I would’ve done: a co-op brawler with over-the-top animations bringing to life what Rare tried to do with 8-bit sprites. The fist gets comically large when it connects, the boot becomes gigantic, etc. It looks great, and they even found a way to make the Turbo Tunnel somewhat playable.
As someone who was looking forward to playing Psychonauts 2 ON SWITCH I felt nothing but PURE RAGE the moment this one appeared. It’s an XBox exclusive now, so if I don’t want to have a third current-gen console taking up space, the PC is the best I can hope for. And it will NEVER be portable, though I guess if Cuphead can cross over there’s at least a little hope.
Just kidding, no one cares about this. Moving on….
As anticipated, the first real look at Borderlands 3 happened today. It picks up the storyline from Borderlands 2 and Tales From The Borderlands. There is a bridging chapter called Commander Lilith and the Fight For Sanctuary that’s free of charge (and available now!) but you will have to own the previous two games to download it.
For some weird reason Namco doesn’t have this up yet, so we’ll have to piggyback off Kotaku’s account, but here it is, as leaked yesterday — Tales of Arise. And our suspicions that they were abandoning the anime aesthetic were unfounded. It not only looks great but faithful.
Finally, the highlight of the entire afternoon was when the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 trailer made its debut and there, to hype its premiere, was star Keanu Reeves. We even got a release date: April 16, 2020.