E3 2021 Things I Want to Talk About Part 2: The Indies

There's plenty of reason to be disappointed in this E3. It was a weird show from a weird year. Physical reality fucked up a lot of big AAA plans. But one reason to be disappointed is not a lack of games. There's too many great games this year. E3 2021 might be one of the best shows in recent memory if all these games hit their potential.

Big studios move like glaciers in this industry. The pandemic could end tomorrow and we'll still be feel its impact for years. But, smaller games from smaller studios don't need to move glaciers. A lot of those companies were already working from home and could easily adapt to a closed offices. Some might have had no pause in development at all. Video games were also indisputably the safest bet for entertainment investments last year. This was the only entertainment industry to do better under plague conditions than worse. There's a lot of money out there all of sudden, especially when Microsoft needs their Netflix model to be flushed with content. Indie games are looking great.

This reflected in the shows themselves. The really big events like Summer Games Fest or Microsoft would show the bare minimum of their games. I know about as much about Starfield today as I did before that trailer played on Sunday. MS and Bethesda would rather you know nothing about Starfield for another year and please stop asking. Meanwhile indie devs got on camera and told their story. They were here to sell you, not fit some huge billion dollar company's grand strategy. That made the big games seem boring and their events dull. Meanwhile, I was thrilled constantly watching streams like Days of the Devs or The Tribeca Games Showcase or The PC Gaming Show. AAA games at E3 2021 were a cruel starvation diet. Indie games were a feast.

Plus, no AAA game was playable this year except that Final Fantasy CHAOS thing. Tons of indie games are out now on Xbox or PC. You still have a few days to try all this out.

Let's start. I have a lot of games that look great to go over:

E3 2021 Things I Want to Talk About Part 1: The Non-Indies

Gamer Christmas has come and passed. Let's talk about it.

Last year there was no official E3 thanks to a pandemic you might have heard about in the news. With E3 2020 cancelled, the usual downpour of gaming news instead trickled out slowly over the summer. It wasn't an E3 by name, but it was an extra-long E3 in spirit. Honestly, E3 2021 needs as much of an asterisk as last year. There was no physical event. The LA Convention Center remained closed and empty. Everybody, from industry insiders to professional media to fans, all shared the experience the same way - on their computers at home. It's egalitarian.

Personally, I love the accessibility of E3 this year. About forty indie demos dropped on Xbox and PC. So instead of needing to wander the floor, hunting for something cool, you can play that something cool at home right now. You didn't need a GameSpot badge to see Square Enix's over-long look at Guardians of the Galaxy. Instead, SE made you watch it during a very dull stream. Yeah, the actual E3 insider experience isn't all glamorous, sometimes its watching uninteresting stuff like that in backroom presentations. Speaking of the duller side of E3, you got to see it on Monday. Lots of random exhibitors like Verizon, "VoltEdge LLC", and "The Sensorium Corporation" fill up space on those floors. Monday's streams of Verizon and Razer were just like wandering the outer edge of the South Floor, all of it filler.

Covid-19 has definitely put a big pause on the industry's grand plans, and that's reflected in this E3. Most of the big AAA games are still a mess. The pandemic only just ended for some people in lucky areas, and still is raging at full force for most of the world. So let's not pretend that's over by any means. It was a disappointing E3 if you wanted a lot of big games this year or many answers. But it was a great E3 if you wanted smaller indie games. I'll have more to say about them tomorrow. There's still a ton to discuss in the non-indie space. Too much to say, in fact.

Let's go:

The Snyder Cut: A Play in Seven Acts

Part 1: Something Lighter

I am almost disappointed by how tasteful the Snyder Cut of Justice League was. If you asked me to imagine what four hours of Zack Snyder superhero filmmaking would look like, with Snyder being given final cut, it would not have been this. I was bracing for something brutal and purposefully awful, the Lars von Trier of superhero movies. I turned on the radio bracing for 6ix9ine and instead heard Chicago.

Here we have Zack Snyder, the guy who brought us Sucker Punch, "Granny’s Peach Tea", and 9/11 times 1,000 melting down Metropolis. None of that awfulness is here. Instead, Zack Snyder made a restrained, actually simple Justice League movie. I am not repulsed on a moral or aesthetic level. Instead, Justice League is perfectly competent.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League, "A Zack Snyder Film", opens with a short message telling us “This film is presented in a 4:3 format to preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.” In 2021, very little is made for 4:3 anymore. Even Jeopardy is presented in widescreen. This is one of those idiosyncratic choices that seem to exist to prove the auteur credentials of what you’re watching. Think of Christopher Nolan deciding that audiences did not need to hear the dialog in Tenet. The 4:3 choice prepares you for something bold, something entirely unique. The visionary vision of "Visionary Director" Zack Snyder was so vision-ful that we had to sacrifice huge chunks of our TV set to see it.

Then that vision turned out to be remarkably ordinary. The Snyder Cut is a four-hour movie that feels like six hours, but should be half that. But beside that complaint, there is a perfectly normal action blockbuster in here. With a bit of trimming and a 16:9 frame this would not feel very auteur at all. The most Snyder-y of Snyder scene are hidden at tend end. It amounts to a post-credits scene set before the credits. Other than that Justice League feels like... the Justice League, as you imagined them. Superheros you recognize team up to fight a big dumbass alien guy. 

This is a huge win for HBO Max. But is it a huge win for film as an individual's art form?

Blue Fire - Maybe Don't Be 3D Hollow Knight

Blue Fire is very far from a major release. It has been out since February 4th and has not gotten a ton of press. Like seemingly millions of games that come out every year, Blue Fire is a small indie B-game on the Switch. I only happened to come across it randomly watching Switch game trailers, which is usually how I find the weirdest games I have the most trouble talking about. The other day I bought some fucked-up PS1 nightmare for $4 that probably has cursed me to die horribly in a week. I don't think I'll review that one.

There's so much competition in the indie scene today, Blue Fire is lucky to stand out at all. The game is basically 3D Hollow Knight. That's an easy concept to sell, so I think this game has been more successful than most. (Total guess, nobody has access to sales data.) I found a pretty active discord around the game, so somebody is playing it. The developers were able to sell a few hundred plushes of game’s main character. However, Blue Fire is not a game that make will make many Top 10 Lists when the year ends. It has better hopes of appearing in those annual "10 Indie Games You May Have Missed" pieces.

I struggle with Blue Fire for a couple reasons. First of all, this game is just good enough that it should get a bit more exposure. Yet, Blue Fire is also not some obscure masterpiece that you’re missing out on if you only play the big hits. It is a game with potential but also with serious flaws. That leads me to the other problem. When I say Blue Fire needs more exposure, does it need that exposure from me? This might be the only time you will ever hear about this game, and it is coming from somebody who only kind of liked it. Well, I did love something about Blue Fire, just not the main selling point.

Blue Fire is a pretty okay 3D translation of Hollow Knight.That's all good enough, I guess. Instead, Blue Fire is actually one of the greatest 3D platformers I have ever played. That part just happens to be hiding inside a less-than-incredible outer shell. If you want a deeply challenging and rewarding game, its here in Blue Fire. Just not in the main campaign.

Gaming in a Hell Year: Top 10 Video Games of 2020

2020 was the opposite of a bad year for video games. It was an incredible year for games sales. Animal Crossing: New Horizons alone sold over sixty-million copies, double anything else in its franchise. Cyberpunk 2077 was arguably unplayable on launch and still sold thirteen million copies in days. Three months later I still cannot find a PlayStation 5, demand is so high for that thing. And that console basically doesn't have games.

Of course games did great in 2020. What else was there? Movies barely existed, sports leagues had bizarre seasons that seemed to barely matter, and politics was politics. You had Tiger King and video games, that is all of 2020's mass culture. So what could let you escape from the horrors outside?

Escape was the goal for people in 2020. There was nowhere to go but into a video game. The only meals out with friends I had in 2020 were in Yokohama in Yakuza 7. The only road trip was in Kentucky Route Zero. You couldn't date but you could flirt with Meg and Thanatos in Hades. Reality functionally had completely ceased. Life was on pause. Digital lives were about all you could create. Social groups held themselves together around Destiny 2 and Among Us.

Digital escapes were necessary to sanity for a lot of people in 2020. On the other hand, reality is unavoidable even in un-reality. Games still needed to be made by people made by blood and not pixels. A lot of these fantasies, no matter how pleasant, were created only after terrible costs and long brutal crunches. 2020 was a great year to sell a video game, but a really bad year to make one. Just ask CD Projekt Red. Or Naughty Dog. Or Ubisoft. Or the many more studios who delayed projects that may never be finished.

Or maybe it is just 2020. It is very hard to be happy about a lot of things right now. The storm is only just beginning to pass. We will be feeling the effects of it for years in this industry. If E3 2021 happens is really the least of the open questions for studios and critics and players. Games are doing better than movies are, but only after tremendous and still unappreciated effort to keep the wheels turning. There is no sufficient way to thank the people who gave up thousands of hours of their lives just so I could murder a zombie or two. I don't want anybody to forget that all this came at a cost.

However, I have no better way to thank those developers but to talk about how great their games are. Nothing I could say would be sufficient. So sadly, all I can offer is Top 10 List.