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And so it’s upon us. The Electronic Entertainment Expo has begun to bend the light of Los Angeles into its maw. For those sorry souls who are duty-bound to cover the event, the true, countless denotations of those three Es are revealed: Excitement and Enthusiasm, then Evaporation, Enervation, through to Espresso before Erratic, on to Embattled and Embittered, finally Enmity and Escape. If you’re the sensible sort, you stay away, keep yourself abreast of the biggest announcements as they waft by on the balmy California breeze, and shuffle them to shaded corners of the mind before getting back to the real world.
But of course, we’re not the sensible sort, are we? At VideoGamer, you will find all sorts of coverage, from news to livestreams, but I’d like to devote a few quiet moments here to some of the games that we won’t get to see. These I present to you for no other reason than they would amuse me greatly – I’m not convinced I’d be all that up for most of them, but they are the sorts of things that would make me produce a non-committal, impressed little noise, and that’s surely where developers and publishers should focus their resources.
Red Steel 3
Back in 2006, a decade before virtual reality started huffing and puffing and threatening to blow us away, Waggling a Wii remote and Nunchuk to wield a gun and sword was as cutting-edge as it got. A game like Blood & Truth is Red Steel 3, I suppose – only we gaze through the eyes of a thug in a world fashioned on a Guy Ritchie gangster movie (a moderately more enjoyable experience than gazing at a Guy Ritchie gangster movie). But Red Steel had a sanguine streak that whipped it toward the madcap. Its sequel was stand-alone, whisking us to a Western-tinged setting, and I can imagine Red Steel 3 with a John Wickish flavour to it – all perspex and purple neon. Ubisoft Paris, who made Red Steel, is busying away on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Bah! Leave the ghosts to haunt their jungles, I say.
Blinx 3
Along with being something called a Time Sweeper, Blinx is something of an oft-forgotten Microsoft mascot. He lugged a gadget around that look half leaf blower, half guitar, and he was an anthropomorphic cat. There was a sequel, entitled Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space, but few seemed to care. There were also anthropomorphic pigs. Something like Blinx still has the capacity to make me enormously happy. There’s a knock-off nuance to his face, which has been gripped by the grin of the second-tier mascot – the ranks of the also-rans include Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, Bubsy, and Jersey Devil, if anyone remembers him. Let’s have this be the E3 of the rejected mascots! Gex is also welcome, should he care to make a comeback.
Driver 4
Unless I have miscalculated, there was never a Driver 4. There was a Driver: Parallel Lines, a Driver 76, and then there was Driver: San Francisco – all subtitles of tempting promise, to be sure, but nary a ‘4’ amongst them. It’s a great shame, not just because of my fondness for the series but because of the many possibilities of number placement. If Driver 3 was, in fact, Driv3r, then Driver 4 could be ‘4river,’ or ‘Dri4er’ – but that one would be dependant on the way the ‘4’ was stylised. It could be ‘Driv4r,’ which perhaps seems most likely, and then there is the chance of ‘Dr4ver,’ but that just seems silly. ‘Drive4’ is out because that would make it seem as if it the game was called ‘Drive.’ Likewise ‘D4ive’ might refer to the latest in a line of deep sea diving games.
Rogue Warrior 2
If a late-career comeback was on the cards for Mickey Rourke, as it was in The Wrestler, then perhaps it could be, too, for Rogue Warrior, a game he leant his voice – that freshly ground whisper – to. The game benefitted from something to which we could generously ascribe the word ‘plot’: a Navy SEAL bats away orders from back home and goes on a tear through North Korea and the Soviet Union, spitting expletives and splitting skulls. I think Rogue Warrior 2 should tease out the softer side of the brute. The first game was set in 1986; the second could switch to the present, wherein the same Rourke character, Richard Marcinko, finds himself, in a treacherous twist of fate, desk-bound – delivering support to some young buck out in the field and trying to save him from the same bitter fate.
The Loud Man
Imagine a spiritual successor to The Quiet Man.
Velvet Assassin 2: Revelvengenace Revising
There’s a certain circle of non-supernatural thriller/espionage games that don’t seem to get made now: No One Lives Forever, The Saboteur, and Velvet Assassin all spring to mind. The first Velvet Assassin came out, but no one cared. And that’s why it would be amusing if a sequel were in the spawning. The story of the first game concerned Dorset-born Violette Summer, a woman plucked and pushed into the British intelligence services during World War II. The story also demanded she wear a nightdress in some sequences, despite the obvious combat drawbacks therein. I wouldn’t know what to think if this E3 brought us a Velvet Assassin sequel, or quite why it would opt for a subtitle of such bizarre nonsense, but it would.
Exit 3
Actually, something like Exit 3 is bound to happen – probably for the Switch.
