Okay, I HAVE to talk about the Disney Marvel Games showcase

 Disaster incarnate

I have been deftly missing absolutely every single press conference that has come out this year; without the stability of E3 in my life it's almost felt like every single big developer has randomly selected their week to do a reveal event and I'm just supposed to sense it on the wind. As it just so happens I was just skimming the Youtube home page when I heard about the 'Disney Marvel games showcase', a combination of words I never quite expected to see together and so found myself more than mildly intrigued by. Why not tune in to what could very well be the first of many games showcases for the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world that still has a centralised brand image? That could be historic! In fact, I pretty sure it will be whatever happens. So I ended up watching the event and can now, in the literal minutes after it ended, share with you that it was nigh-on atrocious. One of the worst reveal events I've ever seen, only really topped by that Gearbox showcase a while back which revealed nothing and just sent Randy Pitchford wandering around a film set for fifteen minutes.

Now of course, one might be asking exactly what it is that makes a 'bad' video game showcase, and the truth is that there is no definitive checklist, just as there never is in matters of objectivity; but if we look at this mechanically we can actually break down the basic parameters. First of all, the event has to recognise that the ratio between games being shown and hosts talking needs to be skewered in the favour of the former. A showcase is the time to display the games that are being worked on, a deeper dive video needs to exist separately so that those who are interested in that particular product can go look it up. Think of the viewers like fish and the developers as fisherman. They're trying to bait their lines enough to lure in the fish, so they need to show off the goods and keep the line dangling to keep things lively and convince fans there's something interesting here. Let the line sit like its dead, or bait it with a lifeless animatic, and the fish are going to get bored and swim off elsewhere. And let me tell you; for this entire show I felt like dipping.

First off, our illustrious host Mr Blessing wasn't making matter easy. Now there's always going to be a friction between a showcase line-up and it's host, because every second we're looking at the host, we're not seeing new games and, usually, the host is saying nothing of any relevance to the game in question beyond repeating a release date that was already shown off in the trailer. Mr Blessing didn't even have any release dates to rattle off, he literally just hype-manned each game with a 'that looks sick' etc. For every trailer with typically sterile corporate enthusiasm. (In his defence he did, rather cringily, introduce himself as a an NPC.) I think the best way to do a host is the way that Nintendo does it. Borderline text-to-speech disembodied voice over back-to-back game coverage, and if we ever need to see a human it's going to either be the CEO or the game director coming on to beg our forgiveness before they delay Breath of the Wild 2 for another year! (Sorry, I got off track...)

But the second poison pill which killed this conference is something that our Host couldn't have saved if he was replaced with all the charisma of Lalo Salamanca; there was literally nothing to show off. I don't mean there were no new game announcements, because there absolutely were; I mean that of those games, the teams had nothing to cobble together representing the gameplay content of those games. We got cinematic after cinematic incessantly, and the couple of times there was gameplay, it was for games with painfully predictable premises! The Mario Kart rip-off? Yeah, I can imagine how that plays, thank you very much! Hearthstone with Marvel Characters? I don't even know why you're making that instead of just selling a cross-over opportunity to Magic: The Gathering like every other brand does...

The showcase did have some reveals, however, such as a cute looking multiplayer 2D platformer themed in the new Mickey show style. That was decent. We also saw some more of Midnight Suns, and I'm rapidly reaching the point where I'm seeing much more of this game then I ever needed to; I honestly don't know what I have to look forward to in the full release of the game any more at this point. I've seen all the animations, I've seen all their special moves. I think we've had every character revealed and seen how Boss fights play out. I'd just like the game now, please! And we got the aforementioned Mario kart game with a name so forgettable I'm going to guess it right now instead of look it up in the hopes that my short term memory has managed to nail it. Was it... Speedstorm? Oh my god it was! I am a king among mortals!

Also shown were those Avatar games which no one asked for- oh wait, did I forget to mention? There's two of them now, buddy! That first game by Ubisoft is allegoric to showing off footage because I suppose at this point Ubisoft knowns how instantly recognisable their tired formula is and figures that the less they show us, the better. The second game is- wait, really? Oh god. The second game is an MMO RPG, I kid you not. No doubt developed by a team who have totally no idea the amount of commitment required to make an MMO RPG function like it should and who only see the returns of the big players in the industry and simply stand there, gaping with dollar signs in their eyes. It doesn't even look visually impressive, which is literally the key selling point of the Avatar franchise: visual appeal over substance!

What else, what else? Umm... we got a cinematic for a game featuring some Disney villains with absolutely no details about what the game is supposed to be. They might as well have just posted a screenshot of their trademark filling on Twitter, we'd know about as much about the game as we do now. Then there was... geez this is hard... I think there was some sort of cinematic for a Mobile game featuring more cartoony versions of Marvel heroes... no wait, that was Strike Force, that game's already out... Oh that's right! Niantic decided they want to try and cannibalise their own audience even further with another game to slap up next to the Pokemon Go, Hogwarts Wizards Unite and Pikmin Bloom audience! (Wasn't there a Witcher themed game in there somewhere as well?) So these are all stocking stuffers; what about the big show stopper games that everyone came to this event for? What about the updates to Wolverine, Spider-man 2 or Kingdom Hearts 4?

Well there was one teaser that I think they wanted to be a showstopper event at the end of the conference. It was a big tease featuring Captain America, Bucky, Black Panther and... someone else, I actually don't know, in World War 2 Paris starring in what looks to be some action adventure multiverse Marvel game. Oh wait, Amy Hennig is involved? In that case it's going to get cancelled. That woman is cursed, I swear. How she managed to get out the hugely successful Uncharted games without a satellite falling on the development office, I'll never now. But that was everything. The whole event. No big final showcase, no update to the huge Disney branded projects that are still floating around with very few details, just a few table scraps and a pat on the back. So welcome back to the world of game development after your extended hiatus, Disney; but maybe you should wait until you have something to actually show before you waste everyone's time and energy. That would be sweet, thanks.