Hey, due to family commitments I’m moving my news round up from Tuesday to Wednesday. Also this is a rant about E3, so not so much news. Expect regular unbitter broadcasts next week.

TS Eliot wrote an excellent poem about the end of the world (read it here, go on, get literate) suggesting the end of the world, the end of humanity, will come not with a bang, but a whimper. It’s not hard to imagine Eliot using the same line to describe E3. The event has rolled into town, made a hell of a lot of noise, and rolled out leaving gamers without much to show. Could this be the most disappointing E3 we’ve ever had?

Let’s take a look at the major players and summarise their efforts.

Microsoft kicked off the show with practically no new game announcements. Their biggest selling point was Smart Glass, not really a new technology to anyone who’s bought a Samsung TV or any of the other smart TV’s in the last two years. The spokesman said he was constantly being asked about when the Xbox could be used for internet browsing. Really? By who? Are these people unfamiliar with tablet computers? Smart phones? Who on the face of the earth are eagerly awaiting Internet Explorer, the most reviled browser in the world, to be usable on their Xbox. The Kinect seemed to get a little shafted this year. After all the amazing Kinect hacks we’ve seen this past year and Microsoft promising big things for their motion controller, last year’s most promising new peripheral for the Xbox was almost completely ignored. The Crytek motion controlled ancient Rome game teased last year was completely absent.

Sony were likewise struggling to prove they had any new cards up their sleeves. The tone of their presentation was all over the place and it was difficult to nail down what aspect of the PS3 or the Vita they really wanted to promote. They did better than Microsoft though, with a few new game announcements for the Vita that will definitely make the handheld an attractive Christmas purchase, and Wonderbook which was my favourite new thing at E3 this year. Pushing The Last of Us as they’re crown jewel game was also a mistake. It’s an untested, unknown game that was unveiled months ago and the new footage didn’t have much more insight than we all ready have. Microsoft went with Halo 4, a game they’ve likewise been trumpeting for a while, but still a title intrinsically tied to their brand. The Last of Us seems like a great game, but it certainly doesn’t look like a platform carrier. Much like Microsoft’s camera shy treatment of the Kinect, the PS Move was flashed on screen and then stuffed under the carpet. And not a single freaking word about Last Guardian, not even a mention, what the fudge?!

If any hardware developer ‘won’ E3 it was Nintendo, they had their next gen offering, the Wii U, on full display with a bunch of new games. Unfortunately the next gen offering is in reality a step into ‘current gen’ hardware and the games on offer weren’t really what anyone wanted to know about. ZombieU looks promising, and the chibi superhero versus aliens game Project P1000 looks kind of fun. Overall Nintendo carried the banner of new and exciting, which E3 is really supposed to be all about.

Ubisoft had a good show, gaining a lot of attention for their part GTA, part low tech Deus Ex game Watch Dogs. While the game looks pretty great, the fact it doesn’t look incredible and yet made top of the list on numerous ‘best of show’ lists is indicative of how average the overall show was.

Besides The Last Guardian there were a few games we didn’t hear much out of E3 about. No news on GTA V, .......

Overall I’m feeling a little depressed at the state of E3, what was once a show I dreamed of going to is now something I feel like I’d actively avoid. When an entire audience of professional press people holler and cheer for a spokesperson who says they’ve made it easier to use the Bing search engine on the Xbox I begin to wonder if the event has much merit.

Admittedly, this is probably the worst E3 there ever will be. It’s right at the end of a long hardware cycle, the last half of which has been marred with little risk taking by developers and dozens of almost identical games and sequels. Personally there’s a little bit of fatigue happening in my gamer world over the same titles getting trooped out year after year and I was really hoping for something to get excited about, like really can’t wait for it levels of excitement. Sadly E3 2012 had a complete lack of excitement around all its announcements.

Next year will be the exciting unveiling of the PS4 and Xbox something. Maybe something genuinely exciting will actually happen like the unveiling of some sort of Apple game device or Valve built console. But overall I don’t think we’ll ever recapture the excitement and magic of this console generation again. The politics, drama and chance taking new IPs all seem like relics of the past now.

At least I can still go to Comic Con and meet Stan Lee.