E3 2016: 5 Ups & 4 Downs From The PC Gaming Show
Sorry folks, no Half-Life 3.
E3's PC Gaming Show launched last year as a response to the grandiose floor presentations that dominate E3, its aim being to focus more on games and less on corporate buzz-words that can bloat out the bigger presentations.
While the scale is much smaller and there typically wasn't much in the way of big announcements at the show, it's still a welcome alternative to the bigger conferences, and admirably trimmed most of the fat away to give the games and developers total priority.
Sure, it wasn't all great, and the show's organisers need to sometimes be a little more self-aware with how the presentation depicts PC gamers on the whole, but the more promising titles unquestionably spoke for themselves.
Beginning with what didn't work, here are 5 ups and 4 downs from E3 2016's PC Gaming Show...
9. That Cringe-Worthy PC Gaming Montage
Near the end of the show, a video aired which aimed to "celebrate the mouse and keyboard", but ended up being an hilariously tone-deaf cringe-fest as random PC gamers exalted the tools to the heavens.
One player called it "an extension of our reflexes" and stated that "PC gamers care about what's under the hood, they care about how it all works", the implicit smackdown of consoles essentially making him sound like a user from /r/pcmasterrace.
A guy then claims that his favourite key is the tilde, and another asks us to consider PC gaming without a mouse and keyboard.
We then cut back to the aforementioned Redditor, who talks about "waffle stomping newbies" on Overwatch and says without a hint of irony, "If I had to pick one word to describe a mouse and keyboard...total control." Yikes.